A Photograph of a Grain of Salt
by Adam Clay
Some mornings everything feels spectacular
or maybe I mean everything feels like spectacle.
The rain seems unbelievable on the other side
of the curtains. Outside, crime scene tape
whips in the wind like some twenty-first century
tumbleweed. Tomorrow night so far away,
I don鈥檛 imagine knowing why. A hand in front
of my face鈥攎y hand鈥攄isappears when I hold
it up. 91社区 suffering what if the old masters
had it wrong, how a frame can鈥檛 hold everything
or how some musings fall short to what loss
can mean on a microscopic level. A look
at anything up close is like looking at everything
at once and then it鈥檚 like nothing, nothing at all.
I suppose this is an ekphrastic poem about an ekphrastic poem, but it started out with me thinking about the opening of Auden鈥檚 鈥淢us茅e des Beaux Arts.鈥� What if the old masters were somehow wrong about suffering? Dying Icarus shuffled off in the background of the painting is one way to think about loss, but what happens when you zoom in on the image of the splash in the background? The rest of the painting becomes secondary. Initially, the poem began with 鈥�91社区 suffering what if鈥︹��, but I ended up moving this sentence down into the poem and incorporating some mundane images I had catalogued from a morning run the day before. The title arrived thanks to a few grains of salt on the kitchen table, where I typically write. Zooming in on such a mundane image, I was amazed by the symmetry and beauty of what鈥檚 there hidden beneath the surface.
鈥檚 latest book is Circle Back (Milkweed Editions, 2024). He directs the MFA program at Louisiana State University.