Diane Arbus's Poetic Soul

Shooting the pastoral defaced by litter, she chased colourful comics

Blowing on the wind. Ran like mad to keep up with flying Dick Tracy.

She was Dick Tracy on the trail of the uncanny. When Amy stumbled

from the duck pond dripping grass and water she saw an angry inept mermaid.

Often, she was swamped sick with lethargic gloom. During convalescence

she felt a strange rage every night at 4am like a werewolf. How to make

the raw wild power into energy? She said she was like someone who puts vaseline

On her glasses to make it look more like what she normally saw with her slight defect in eyesight.

Eye to the keyhole waiting for the odd to shoot itself through the looking glass.

Hyped on clarity, discovering the real differences between things,

Flesh and material, densities, air water and the shiny. Looking hard for revelation.

Uneased. Guggenheim dizzied her with its small series of offices - judgment day in a bad dream;

Florida smelled bad like god cooking chicken soup in the sky. A nudist camp was like walking

Into an hallucination without being quite sure whose it was. She noticed that sometimes they feel

The impulse to slip into something more comfortable. It was as if God forgave Adam and Eve

And told them to stay in the garden and muck it up.

A magic mirror. She reflected back what anyone wanted to believe, like Atlas

Holding up a bubble and groaning. She reflected: Messiahs passing by across the street

In Washington Square living on the brink of a black pit; A human pincushion
and a headless man in a horror show that admitted babies free; a furry Rasputin

Who denied that Shakespeare wrote his plays or that Moses was a Jew and was like a seer

Who had forgotten his own secret; Max pretending to be Uncle Sam because he thinks people

Would like to think he is. She discovered a theatre of fictional beings looking for their stories.

She didn’t press the shutter, those images did.

Backstage at a circus with squinting spangled mothers spanking their squealing children

Or stuffing plastic milk bottles into their mouths while she bumped into an elephant

She realised the farther afield she strayed the more she went home. It was as if an arbitrary god

Had plonked her down in the wrong place with glee and what she had to search for
Was who she really ought to be. Her notebooks were the poetry of an artist who was always

answering to someone who wasn’t even asking.