Photo:  Pam White

I am so lucky.  She has been shooting me for 28 years.  We are not close to stopping.  Yesterday, we shot nearly 600 frames at the marvelous studios of our friend the sculptor Gillian Jagger.

Today, she wrote me this poem:

This Earth

You were put here on this earth

to drive me nuts. Only that, oh,

and your shadow devouring you in the earthly

last light of day in my film of your movement.

Motion shivers your amazing body, shadows, body, dipping

tangling with yourself in realtime and slow mo.

And me, I can see me in the shake of the camera,

when the great angle is made, when the dove flies

up the wall with your shadow. I can feel your

movement in my aching arms, my ant-bitten ankles

as the camera does its job. In Italian – where we each

live parts of our days – camera means room.

There is room in our hearts for this shake

that is us, this flight on the wall, the light

on your face walking backwards to me.

I have to be so still when I get the great shot, you

have to keep going when you ace the phrase: movement

perfection, body lit. As we work the tangle of our lives

the light reaches its peak and retracts, we go on.