Art — Poetry & Photography

Poetry

Words from the notebooks.

Inventory

They will ask what you lost
and you will have a list.

Nobody asks what you kept:
the stubborn lung-full of morning,
the hand that still reaches,
the small animal of hope
you swore you'd stopped feeding
that kept sleeping at your door anyway.

Count that too.
Count that first.

— Kate Vollmer

The Body Remembers Flight

Once, I threw myself at the sky
four inches of beam beneath me
and called it standing still.

Now some days the floor is the beam
and crossing the kitchen
is its own dismount.

But the body remembers flight —
not in the muscle,
in the nerve that says
you have left the ground before.
You know how this is done.

You lean toward the empty air
and trust it.

— Kate Vollmer

Compound

Grief came like weather that year,
one front stacked behind another,
no sky between the storms.

I learned you cannot bail that water
one loss at a time.
You learn to float in it.
You learn the others floating near you
are not debris
but rafts.

Reach.
That's the whole instruction.
Reach.

— Kate Vollmer

Never Too Late

Whoever told you the door was closed
had never met the door,
had never stood where you stand now,
hand full of keys you cut yourself
from every hard year.

The house of your life is not finished.
It is not even quiet.
Somewhere in it, a room
you have never entered
is waiting with the lights on —

late, yes. Later than you wanted.

But look: still lit.

— Kate Vollmer

I wrote to survive it. I photograph to remember that I did.

On making things

Photography

Learning to see again.

During recovery, a camera gave me a reason to leave the house and a way to practice noticing. When your world gets small, you start finding the enormous things inside it — a bee mid-flight, the architecture of a single flower, a canal that keeps living whether or not you're up for it. Every photograph here is mine, and every one of them is a day I chose to go outside.