Three Poems on Sally Mann, by Gail DiMaggio

Child Dancing in Her Back Yard 

Maybe last winter, she saw a tulle-
woman spinning in the static
of an old TV. From behind
 
the camera, her mother calls out,
Turn. and then, Turn back,
but the naked child is busy feeling
 
her body in the sun, in the shape
of dancing. Tendrils
of toffee-brown hair
 
bedraggle her shoulders, and around her
all the while, the trumpet vine--
called creeper, called devil’s
 
shoestring--flourishes
ruthlessly. Three blossoms pose
above her head, their
 
narrow throats open
to hummingbirds,
and long-tongued bees while
 
deep in the leafy, twisting core,
a hungry hornworm
doesn’t know itself, doesn’t know it’s
 
beginning to become
the green-dappled moth
called sphinx.

​**

Female Gaze

 In love with the austere line
of her dying husband’s back,
Sally Mann balances her clumsy
camera on a shallow ridge
and sends him into the valley.
Didn’t I do the same on a day
near the end when I was gripped
with denial?  Certain
I could bear the sight
of my love walking away. Alone
under the black cloth, Sally
wills her stubborn machine
to pull his diminishing body
back: loose gait , square
shoulders, left hand holding
a ragged clump of earth.
White haze floats like scrim
in the widening space between them,
and the man—distracted or
grieving or maybe
just familiar with her art,
its ruthlessness—the man
strides off into the high grass.
No way to know if he still listens
for a voice,
trying to call him back.

**

Jessie Hanging from the Hay Hook

The naked girl
and a leaning sycamore
split the after-supper space
on the grey deck. Over here,
her father looks the other way.
Over there a grandmother
dozes, a sister gnaws
watermelon. Behind
the big box camera, under
the dark cloth, her mother
waits to catch what she calls,
the angel of uncertainty. I imagine
Jesse feels surrounded and
invisible.  I remember
a moment like that--
woman on one side, girl on the other--
Wanting to cross the barrier,
lean dizzily out and test
how much gravity I could
endure. Maybe that’s why
Jessie stretches
her hands to a height
she’s never before possessed,
grips the hook
and lifts her beauty onto it:
shining skin over  
elegant bone, the mons,
the breasts barely budded.
Her head falls backward,
a sheaf of hair ripples out
away from her, and
her mother releases the shutter.
Now for all time—Jessie
hanging from the hay hook--
a white and human slash
across the half-open mouth of the dark.
Not even sore. Not even trembling.

​Gail DiMaggio

​"Child Dancing in Her Back Yard" was inspired by Sally Mann's photo, Trumpet Flowers. See it here.
"Female Gaze" was inspired by Sally Mann's photo, The Turn. See it here.
"Jessie Hanging From the Hay Hook" was inspired by Sally Mann's photo, Hay Hook. See it here.

​Gail DiMaggio lives and writes in Concord NH. Her work has appeared most recently in Salamander, Slipstream and the Tishman Review. In 2017, her book, Woman Prime, was chosen by Jericho Brown for the Permafrost Poetry Prize and was released in Feb. 2018 by Alaska University Press.