Not hunted really, but trapped—
the light made it difficult to look.
Her first eye, through a second eye,
captured her subjects' eyes.
The subjects' eyes, when captured,
saw her second eye first.
Later she fixed them in solutions,
neither knowing any better nor any worse.
neither knowing any better nor any worse.
Did I do the grammar correctly?
ReplyDeleteGrammar's fine - if you're worried about the 'neither-or' line. But the ambiguous pronoun-antecedent slows down the poem: the 'Her' that begins the second couplet can refer to both Arbus and the one 'trapped' in the photo. And the "light made it difficult" for whom? The viewer of the photo, the photographer, or the subject?
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DeleteI've been reading and re-reading the last two lines - which are powerful, I think mainly because of the word solution - as in both photo developing solution and some divine solution or answer or implicitly demanded solution. Nice, Bully. Thanks for uploading the photo. Arbus has always been, for me, difficult to look at . . .
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