A poem as a snapshot

 Above the harbor, amid the chimneypots …

of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines

            a woman pastes up sails

                        upon the wind

            hanging out her morning sheets

                        with wooden pins.

The wind catches her last sheet and winds it around her amorously. Caught with her arms above her, the woman throws her head back and laughs.

That’s it: a snapshot of lovely moment.

The poem is “Away above the harborful.” It’s the first poem in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World, the first book he published at City Lights.

I am not a Lawrence Ferlinghetti champion. But when people talk about what poetry is, I sometimes think that Ferlinghetti showed what it could be.

When I was a boy, we’d gather around and look at photos from a roll of film that had just come back from the lab. Some of Ferlinghetti’s poems hit me that way.

He sometimes used poetry in the same way that a good photographer uses a camera.

• Source: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World; San Francisco: City Lights Books, p.1. Ferlinghetti was born March 24, 1919, 103 years ago. He died two years ago at 101.