Lisa Gluskin
Blankness
There was nothing to look at.
I was nineteen. I took a camera, came in
from the hard-baked heat, came out again
into a landscape American as sprawl: burned-in
furrows, the space between a thing and its opposite.
Flat arc of white sky, and the field, and the road between.
Got down low to the ground, pressed flat to the same soft tar
that filled my frame, shot heat so dry it shone
like water, fifty feet down that slick yellow line.
It was August, two P.M., 105. Nineteen. I was looking -
bleached-bone hot, open as the shutter, liquid as the road.
Lisa Gluskin is a San Francisco writer and editor. Another poem of hers, Air Conditioner, appeared in Gumball Poetry's Spring 2000 issue. Lately, she's been
working real hard not to signify. You can see more of her work here.
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