Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving
–based on an old photograph bought in a shop at Half Moon Bay, summer, 1999
No sound, the whole thing.
Unknown folk. People waving from a hillside of ripple grass
to people below in an ongoing meadow.
Side rows of trees waving in a tide of wind,
and because what is moving is not moving,
you catch a state of stasis.
Opposite of this inactivity
you imagine distant music and buzzing and crickets
and that special hot smell of summer.
To the garden past the Bay to the meadow,
cliff sheltered with low clouds, offset by nodding thistle.
Tatter-wort and Stinking Tommy along footpath
worn down by locals. But who and why?
In the photograph itself you’re now looking the other way
to unknown clusters of houses.
Where forces are balanced to near perfection.
Who could live
in such a great swollen silence and solitude?
You hear church bells
from Our Lady’s Tears breaking that silence nicely
but just in the right way so silence continues
as though nothing else matters day after day.
And anyway, each face seems so familiar.
What do you do when you wave back?
You wave vigorously.
You remember your own meadow,
your cliffside and town,
photographs forgotten,
the halfhearted motion of your hand,
your grandmother’s church-folk
gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness.
You name the people
whose names are not written on the back.
You forgive them for wrapping themselves in silence.
You enter house after house and open top-floor windows
and you wave down to future generations like this.
–Clarence Major
From CONFIGURATIONS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. Copyright © 1998 by Clarence Major. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.
Source: Waiting for Sweet Betty (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)
The old photograph got my attention right away and stirred my imagination. Who were these people? Who were they waving to? What were their lives like? Where are they? What is their history, their future? Sometimes old photos—and I used to look through a lot of them in street bins in France—evoke so much. –Clarence Major
CLARENCE MAJOR is a novelist, poet and painter. His novels include Dirty Bird Blues (a Penguin Classic), Such Was the Season, a Literary Guild selection; My Amputations, winner of the Western States Book Award; Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; and One Flesh. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Harvard Review, and dozens of other periodicals. He is the author of sixteen collections of poetry. A Fulbright scholar, Major won a National Book Award Bronze Medal, the Western States Book Award for fiction, a National Council on The Arts Award; in 2015 he won a “Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts” from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and in 2016 a PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett “Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature.” He was elected to The Georgia State Writers Fall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth century American literature at the University of California at Davis.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Six): Clarence Major
Clarence Major’s “Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving” is an ekphrastic of the unnamed, named. Which is to say it speaks to and for its subject. Major, himself painter as well as poet, is a maestro of relations between art and life, experience and memory, motion and stillness. It is fitting that the poet found the photograph at a store at the mysterious-sounding “Half-Moon Bay.” A bay is a stasis, a peacefulness—it is the sea’s Sunday.
The poem starts by removing sound, since a photograph is silent, and this one particularly so—so it can surprise us later. The poem is not just visual, but kinesthetic. It moves us, not just emotionally, but spatially.
The first motion is of the anonymous hands, whose undulations translate into “ripple grass,” to an “ongoing meadow,” to “side rows of trees waving in a tide of wind,” “and because what is moving is not moving / you catch a state of stasis.” The “you” makes us spectators of the photograph, puts us under its spell. And, since opposites invite one another, “you imagine distant music and buzzing and crickets / and that special hot smell of summer.” How effective, that leap of smell, how it penetrates.
The poem continues its waves of description, “to the garden past the Bay to the meadow / cliff sheltered by low clouds, offset by nodding thistle,” its rhythms lifting and dipping, to the pungent surprise of the “common” names “Tatter-wort” and “Stinking Tommy,” plants that become personages “along footpath worn down by locals. But who and why?”
And then, we may feel, we suddenly enter this domain of strangers—“you’re now looking the other way / to unknown clusters of houses.” What a fine précis of architecture, “where forces are balanced / near perfection,” but also of the poem, its rolling descent of the page.
Just as we wonder at the lives of those within the “great swollen silence and solitude,” we hear: “church bells” from the wonderfully-named “Our Lady’s Tears,” each bell a tear made audible, each bell inviting silence, “as though nothing else matters day after day.” Isn’t silence the essence of church, and bells its handmaidens?
Then a wonderfully casual one-line stanza, “And anyway, each face seems so familiar.”Just like that, we have moved from contemplating anonymity to feeling at home:
What do you do when you wave back?
You wave vigorously.
You remember your own meadow,
your cliffside and town,
photographs forgotten,
the halfhearted motion of your hand,
your grandmother’s church-folk
gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness.
At one stroke the people are real to us, our familiars, forgiven their aloofness—and our own past forgiven its lost photographs, our half-gift of a reluctant wave; all of this blessed by the “saintly quietness” of “your grandmother’s church-folk,” a vanished generation:
You name the people
whose names are not written on the back.
You forgive them for wrapping themselves in silence.
Clarence Major’s bravura “Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving,” itself a wave, ends in a cascade of wonders. Finally, we access the soi-disant cliffside mansions to “to open their top-floor windows, . . .and wave down to future generations like this”—the casual, masterful “like this” both describing our own waves—for we are now waving—and making us at home inside the photograph, its life and art.
–Angela Ball
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Author: Angela Ball
