Sandbar Willow, Kristin V. Rehder

After the rain, all the houses in the field lie down 
& we with them: marsh brush tangled in the nest

of our hair, our hair pleated through the roof
a cloudburst smoothed above the junco’s nook, 

doubled over by our unfolding. Dusk collapsed
in the rushes & left her sweat to cool across 

my back, the black of dawn’s silent stirring
now blue in the shade of the moon’s attention 

turning more than tidal drifts of reeds & leaves
the wet geometry of every angle shining. Poor, 

luckless god stuck in the sky: what bartering 
I’d do to lose my aerial roots & know the earth

by the curvatures our bodies stretch & curl 
& tense against. How swift I’d quit the orbiting

of all the sky’s preserves, even so with heaven’s
curated reservations, to see—instead 

of some floodplain’s impish oxbow or spare
& distant willow’s inverse constellation— 

the reflective lake we make of the sandbar’s 
gentle lean: two bodies mirroring the meadowlarks’

exaltation. How can you know from way up there 
for whom each head is bent in prayer? Yes, I’m 

muddying my knees: two sets of hands are clasped 
above our heads, then pulling at the weeds. She guides 

my hat down to her hip & tips it with a cowboy’s air, 
but holds it gently in her grip—Eve’s own fig leaf 

solitaire. Song sparrows quiet then scatter at the sound:
the sun is up & a new house of worship is breaking ground. 

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Author’s Commentary:

In 2024, during my tenure as the Guggenheim Museum’s Poet-in-Residence, I spent much of the year immersed in conversations about ekphrastic responses to paintings. The most complex & thought-provoking discussions were with the Deaf poets I’d invited to be a part of Sixth Stanza: Ekphrasis in Air, an exhibition on the sixth ramp of the iconic New York museum, which featured video projections of Deaf poets performing their ekphrastic responses to art work on display elsewhere. The visual artistry of sign language lends itself beautifully to ekphrasis, complicating the artistic nature of language & the place poetry has in galleries. Signed languages store their grammar in the face—in the body—just as paintings have a grammar of brush stroke & color, while poems use punctuation & spacing. The painter’s tools are the Deaf poet’s, too; where the hand moves, meaning is made. 

After babysitting, photographer’s assistant was my first job: Randy Silver—a third-generation photographer in the Bay Area who had served as one of Kennedy’s White House staff photographers—reached out to the local Girl Scout Council for applicants, no experience required. Randy shot on film of all kinds, including infrared, which he’d learned to handle in the Navy, & I soon understood shutter speeds & exposure numbers, how to identify the scope of a lens by its weight in my hand or smell the expiration date on a roll of Kodak’s 220 Vericolor. For all of high school—when the internet was still in its original version of fearsome & fake news—I spent Saturdays in deep analog, wearing bulky lens knapsacks & fanny packs full of film, carrying tripods through dozens of first dances, trying to get my gear-laden shadow to fit Randy’s. We were, at our best, a seamless, many-armed animal in the background of so many strangers’ happiest days. Photography, I know. Photographs—and how they are composed, as poems are composed—are, for me, art objects full of awe & mystery. 

And so, as curiosity dictates, I try to teach toward what I don’t yet understand. In the early years of my first tenure-track appointment at a small liberal arts college in the Mid-Atlantic, I took my cloud of young poets to the college’s galleries to make ekphrastic poems. Ekphrasis tends to loosen something in many emerging or degree-apprenticed poets; perhaps they, like me, find camaraderie or accompaniment that helps to offset the difficulty of knowing where to begin. In an art gallery, an artist awaits you—has gone ahead, has made the first move at conversation—& the weight of a poem’s possibility is replaced by an unknown comrade’s outstretched arm.

Photography, though, can make that arm feel literal. People sometimes appear in photographs; bodies we recognize (or don’t) as uncanny or referential can shift our relationship to the stakes of art in palpable ways. I’m not foolish enough to claim that poetry is to painting what creative non-fiction is to photography, but there’s something in there that explains the hesitations I sometimes feel when tasked with photographic ekphrasis. 

That spring, my students & I encountered photographer Kristin V. Rehder’s documentary exhibition, Where Hope Finds Home, featuring portraits of over sixty area refugees from nineteen countries, all of whom had resettled in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County. Rehder has a way with light; she wields it the way poets employ lyric suspension, the lush texture of image levitating on the musicality of language. Her photographs transport: instead of seeing, one becomes part of the scene. Instead of looking, the sensory immersion seems both unbelievable & wholly welcome in its pleasure. I don’t know enough to say more about framing or angle, composition or tone. What I know is that for me—& my students—Rehder’s photographs became a conduit or a portal far more powerful than paintings. 

Barthes writes in Camera Lucida that the photograph is “literally an emanation of the referent. From a read body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.” Nearly ten years later, Rehder’s work—& queer kinship in my life—continues to find me, move me, meet me. This summer, as I was enduring dose-dense chemotherapy for breast cancer, a new image appeared in my phone most days: sometimes the sandbar willow, sometimes a bulb in bloom. In ASL, the sign for photograph relocates the eye to the blank page of the open palm, as if to show a literal transfer. Rehder—or Ama Boo, as my toddler calls her—spent months leading me by the imaginative eye through fields & down rivers, into kitchens & windows & sepia-toned anecdotes so full of fine attention & so far away from the toil of this year’s staying-alive that there were days I felt willing to do again: transport me, make me see anew, turn my attention to the window, to the small detail, to the slant of light, to my love’s healing grief & my child’s good wonder. Poets’ work. 

Making poems in conversation with the photographs of someone I love reminds me of those first years with Randy Silver, trying to train my movements into synchrony with his. To do so with the work of someone who is also a queer elder, a writer, & a philosopher of heart, has made me a new animal altogether; who I am to Rehder filters in to the permission the photograph offers me, just as who she is to me allows us a private line, a tin can telephone strung between the photograph’s frame & the poem’s lineation.

“Listing Hour,” was made in response to Rehder’s photograph Sandbar Willow (2025) in the weeks I was recovering from radiation, my skin an unnatural purple & Rehder coaching my chin up, my eyes open. Barthes writes that once there is punctum—once a photograph has penetrated us, to borrow a Kathryn Bond Stockton phrase—a “blind field” is created, a visceral suggestion of a world that exists beyond the frame. If you had asked me last year, I would have said, without hesitation, that this is how poems are made & why they are so well-suited to the expansive worldbuilding ekphrasis allows. What’s truer, I think, is that this is how hope is forged & necessary futures made possible, one image at a time. 

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(Note: Rehder’s Sandbar Willow is not in the public domain and not currently available online; we’ve linked [above] to a catalog of Rehder’s 2023 exhibition Tremor to give readers a sense of her work.)