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He Photographs the Fashionable

by Nick Mueller

 

In baby blue smock that yields just at the waist

he pumps merrily and fearlessly at the bicycle pedals

through seasons and traffic and decades.

 

If I could stride so baby blue and youthful, then I

would be more surprised at oncoming oddities,

more open to them, perhaps.  Wouldn’t you?

 

I like so much about him and in him and what he

speaks with grace and gentleness into the world.

He snaps a fellow who resembles Mister Peanut with a

 

generosity of photographic vision that’s far, far

beyond me.  He says something along the lines that he is

religious, though not specifically so, and that when he went

 

to church as a boy he was more interested in the ladies’ hats.

I giggle.  He giggles at his own remark.  “Are you gay?”

asks the interviewer.  No, I think.  This is a man

 

sexual about the whole giddy shebang that he pedals

through with pleasant demeanor unfailing.  His camera

captures his very fashionable escapades whether haute

 

couture or shabby chic.  I applaud wildly.  I wish

I could be so sexual about tall buildings and higher heels.

However, the lust only stays now and then, as it does now

 

while I write about an octogenarian photographer I have

delightfully blue dreams of.  He in his blue smock snapping wildly

sexual photographs of me at my best, attired in a three-piece gray suit,

 

a sharp white dress shirt and my vintage tie in a Windsor knot.

We talk endlessly about women’s hats and the various fall collections,

and when endless abates, he cycles off. And then I walk into a lesser

 

wardrobe of tomorrow where the brilliant smocks are less timeless

and the bicyclists less fearless, less timely, less baby blue.

 

Punklawyer Note:  Nick is a superb human being living in Tucson, Arizona.