Photographing Tulips

Here's day twenty-three's: submission for NaPoWriMo (a poem a day for the month of April in honor of National Poetry Month):

Photographing Tulips

If the roof of my car crumples

because I climb upon it

to get a better angle on a photograph

what the hell will happen

if it rolls over in an accident?

I thought this today as I watched a young man

with two cameras slung over his shoulders

stand, ankle deep in the roof of his Jeep

as he photographed the tulip fields south of town.

I was photographing too, from the ground.

I recalled Ansel Adams

put a top of solid plywood

on the roof-rack of his station wagon

so he could see the world from new heights,

reflected on the glass of his 8x10 view camera –

a new perspective hidden under the dark cloth

of an upside-down, reversed scene.

He shot ‘Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico’

from up there.

“If I could get a shot like that,”

the young man was probably thinking,

“it’s worth bumping my head

all the way home.”