He Photographs the Fashionable (2016)
“He Photographs the Fashionable” arose after viewing a documentary about the poem’s subject, Bill Cunningham. I revised and finished the poem soon after learning of Cunningham’s death. A dual biography / autobiography in verse form, the poem dazzles the reader with a rapid, NYC-inspired succession of images combined with personal details from the documentary and the author’s life.
In baby blue smock that yields just at the waist
he pumps merrily and fearlessly at the bicycle pedals
through seasons and traffic and decades.
If I could stride so baby blue and youthful, then I
would be more surprised at oncoming oddities,
more open to them, perhaps. Wouldn’t you?
I like so much about him and in him and what he
speaks with grace and gentleness into the world.
He snaps a fellow who resembles Mister Peanut with a
generosity of photographic vision that’s far, far
beyond me. He says something along the lines that he is
religious, though not specifically so, and that when he went
to church as a boy he was more interested in the ladies’ hats.
I giggle. He giggles at his own remark. “Are you gay?”
asks the interviewer. No, I think. This is a man
sexual about the whole giddy shebang that he pedals
through with pleasant demeanor unfailing. His camera
captures his very fashionable escapades whether haute
couture or shabby chic. I applaud wildly. I wish
I could be so sexual about tall buildings and higher heels.
However, the lust only stays now and then, as it does now
while I write about an octogenarian photographer I have
delightfully blue dreams of. He in his blue smock snapping wildly
sexual photographs of me at my best, attired in a three-piece gray suit,
a sharp white dress shirt and my vintage tie in a Windsor knot.
We talk endlessly about women’s hats and the various fall collections,
and when endless abates, he cycles off. And then I walk into a lesser
wardrobe of tomorrow where the brilliant smocks are less timeless
and the bicyclists less fearless, less timely, less baby blue.
