T
HOUGH I intend to
revisit it, inshallah,
in twenty years,
I am happy to be
temporarily done
with Children of
Grass, the most intimate and
substantial thing I’ve ever done.
It is the freedom Icarus felt in the
brief moment when his wax wings
melted and, freshly falling, the
warm sun on his face, he was no
longer bound by the weight of his
dreams. And it is also the sadness
he knew as he watched the earth
grow quickly bigger. Nothing in
my life can replace poetry, but
at some point something most
certainly will.
My own favorite photograph in
the series is a portrait I made on
film of firm, professorial Robert
Hass crossing a street in Newark,
New Jersey, paired with a piece he
wrote a very long time ago. “The
woman I love is greedy,” he wrote,
“but she refuses greed. / She
walks so straightly. / When I ask
her what she wants, / she says, ‘A
yellow bicycle.’ / Sun, sunflower, /
coltsfoot on the roadside, / a gold-
finch, the sign / that says Yield, her
hair, / cat’s eyes, his hunger, / and
a yellow bicycle.”
Were I an honest man, I’d admit
that the morning of the shoot I took
a bolt cutter to the chains around
my old love’s abandoned, dusty
bicycle, bound to a post near my
New York City home. The next
day my phone rang as I was curl-
ing the chain end over end, put-
ting it into my closet. She’d seen
the black-and-white photograph,
called me immediately, needed to
know if Robert Hass was, in fact,
carrying over his shoulder the old
yellow bicycle she’d left behind. “A
yellow bicycle? That can’t possibly
be,” I told her. “The photograph is
silver.”SEPT OCT 2019 90Robert Hass