Two Stieglitz Photographs

1. Apples and Gable, Lake George

The apples are a charcoal gray,
though they manage to shine hard
in the late afternoon's sheer. Rain

glasses their dark amplitude
like light revealing its substance at last—
gathering its mass into droplets,

halfway to falling. All in all,
they possess so much perfection
and still the twigs are able to bold them—

this balancing, every object
lovingly pinched in the jaws of gravity.
And the seal of surfaces—