For Mario Giacomelli
In Senigallia, a port town on the Adriatic
he runs a typesetting shop for fifty years
taking photos on Sundays when the shop
is closed.
He teaches himself painting & photography
inspired by De Sica & Rossellini.
His longtime camera, a Korbell
with a Voigtlander lens cobbled together
& secured with tape.
In the iconic portrait of his mother,
a hospice washerwoman, her rough hands
hold the iron blade of a spade
flat against her face. Dark brows,
a burdened gaze, one shoulder
higher than the other.
In his portraits of the ancient women
of the hospice, he uses a harsh flash,
for a “truthful cruelty.”
Young priests in black cassocks
turn & swirl in a dazzling snowfall,
dancing, throwing snowballs
like vulnerable & exuberant children.
Wrinkled hands remind him
of the furrows on the Marche farmland.
Aerial shots from a crop duster
bring him closer to the earth,
as the fields & hillsides grow abstract
& dream-like with distance.
Windblown hair. He crouches
with camera & tripod.
I’m not, he says, a photographer.
Joan E. Bauer is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008) and The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021). Recent poems have appeared in Spillway, Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream and Chiron Review. For some years, she worked as a teacher and counselor and now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-hosts and curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.