SmokeLong Quarterly

The Novelist Rests

I met Eudora Welty on the corner; she was taking a photograph. “Eudora,” I said, “I didn’t know.” “Why yes,” she answered, “I’ve been interested a goodly while. What a pleasure to catch time, suspend it in emulsion. It’s right hard being god of the clock.” I left her there with a man in a beautiful white shirt. I walked down the street, the horses nosing their reflections in the trough.

The Model

Lee Miller said, “The lens is a fulcrum. As much beauty at the eye, so at the subject.” We laughed, she was drunk, her vanity a charm against the bombs that fell on the London night. Two years later though, we would find a bar in the forest near Dachau. “I saw a German guard murdered,” she said, “Drowned. I took his picture.” We drank our coffee and agreed, even that was circled with a certain terrible light.

Aesthete at Breakfast

Stephen Shore took a picture of his pancakes. He took a picture of the busboy and of the swinging yellow door to the kitchen. Then he smoked a cigarette. “I could take a picture of you,” I said, “with the smoke in your hair.” “No, no,” he answered, “too much mystique.” He composed his eyes, mouth, nose, ears as quietly as possible. The waitress in her pink smock looked at the both of us and smiled.