In the Prints & Drawings Room, V&A,
a pencil moves across paper, the soft sound
rising in the morning air. On the table before me,
a blue box of Cameron’s photographs, the heavy lid
creaking like old wood when I lift it, the photographs
in their thick mats stacked neat inside, a sheet
of rice paper covering each like a shroud.
There is a certain sort of South we like to recall,
and this is not it. Heavy thinking on the corner store
and the father on his tractor doing a fine day’s work,
the mother who loved her kids hard and wore her Bible
out. Not the black and tan dachshund in this photo
from Clearwater, stout and old and prone to snap,
how one summer he ate the oil-black berries that came
after too much rain and died on the stoop the same day.
London, Natural History Museum By AMY TUDOR Pressed in the pages of a King James Bible, a Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing,
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