Philip Booth


Long Afternoons In Dakota

Some plainly hot.

Lala, a Pakistani long in Grand Forks,
much given to early American sea-chests, takes
out her Leica, her eyebrows showing over the lens
she has fixed

next door on

Don J., a forty-year ponytail boy who shifts his eye,
view-finding throgh his new Nikon, onto
a poet's spaniel named Peekaboo, a yard-dog
with limited focus;

none of whom

entertain for a minute the non-Euclidian triangle
they--without posing--compose: they proceed, if
at all, by long fractions of seconds, adjusting
their film speeds or shutters

to June afternoons

in Gand Forks, where I've never been, except to
picture them, cropped, stopped down to f. 16, their local
depth of field, through which they move with slowness
of music I don't quite remember,

probably by Hovhaness.
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