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| Félix-Jacques Moulin Model kissing her Reflection ca. 1854 hand-colored daguerreotypes (stereograph) Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Félix-Jacques Moulin Genre Scene ca. 1854 albumen print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Alban-Adrien Tournachon and Félix Nadar Pierrot Yawning 1854 salted paper print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| attributed to Bruno Braquehais Model in Diaphanous Gown ca. 1854 hand-colored daguerreotypes (stereograph) Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| attributed to Bruno Braquehais Reclining Model in Harem Costume ca. 1856 hand-colored daguerreotypes (stereograph) Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Anonymous Photographer Portrait of Annie Holland ca. 1855 hand-colored daguerreotype Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| Anonymous Photographer Portrait of Arthur Holland (postmortem) ca. 1855 hand-colored daguerreotype Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| Olympe Aguado Gros Chêne au Bois de Boulogne ca. 1855 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Olympe Aguado Crossroads in the Bois de Boulogne ca. 1856 albumen print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| Jeremiah Gurney Mr & Mrs Moses Sperry Beach ca. 1855 hand-colored daguerreotype Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| Félix Nadar Antoine-Samuel Adam-Salomon ca. 1855 albumen print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| Louis-Pierre-Théophile Dubois de Nehaut Women Stacking Carrots ca. 1854-56 salted paper print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Louis-Pierre-Théophile Dubois de Nehaut La nièce de M. Tahon, propriétaire de la maison n° 7 ca. 1854-56 salted paper print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Louis-Pierre-Théophile Dubois de Nehaut Construction of Commemorative Fountain 1856 salted paper print Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Oscar Gustave Rejlander Standing Model ca. 1857 albumen print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Oscar Gustave Rejlander There He Goes 1857 albumen print Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
Angels Grieving over the Dead Christ
The epitaphios of Thessaloniki
From those few famous silkworms smuggled
Into Constantinople in the head of a walking stick
Silk waterfalls
Poured from the ancient bolts
Into now-destitute reservoirs
Of church treasuries in Aachen,
In Liège, in Maastricht, in Sens,
In the Sancta Sanctorum of the Vatican,
Bright rivers seeping past
The age when a teaspoonful of
Silkworm eggs the size of one grain
Could endow a church,
The age when the letters in the words
Of sacred testaments were
Unreeled in the coastal cities of Asia Minor,
When a bookworm conspired
To wrest a maze of empty roads
Through the words My Lord –
That ancient, flickering text
Once permanently affixed
By blind but face-picturing, speechless
But law-breaking wooden shuttles,
Now a heap of gold wires displayed
With a crumbling silk vestment someone
Plucked from a shovelful of dust
During one of those treasure hunts conducted
In the burying grounds, in other eras,
A shovelful of dust
Now blowing into your eyes,
As if a storm wind from Paradise
Blew the rumors of this death
So hard you must cover your eyes
Before the museum case.
The late afternoon tugs
At a gold thread you can hear fraying
When you close your eyes,
A thread you feel your way along,
A thread at which the invisible globe pulls,
Leading you to the end of the world
Where there is a pile of
Clothes stolen from the grave,
Where your fear is relegated
To a masterwork of silk slaves –
That He is dead.
Here death is only a flash of worlds
Unfurled from a rifled
Church treasury, and you are invited
To walk this alluvial wave of gold,
To walk in the labyrinths
Of the angels' howls,
To run your hands along the walls
Of the silk thread's passageways,
To feel with your fingers
The angels' barbaric, stifled,
Glittering vowels
Tightly woven with gold wires.
If you were to tug at one,
Unraveling the angels
Into a vivid labyrinth of thread
From the fourteenth century
Backwards to the scissors blade
A seraph takes to a fragile
Filament of gilt
According to a law still unrevealed,
The shroud would disappear
In the gust of a little breeze
From this door left ajar
Into the next life,
The threshold we cross with closed eyes –
Where angels hide behind their backs
The saws with which they mean
To saw the present from the past,
Oblivious to the scarlet threads
That prove to be hidden among
The filaments, those red rivers
Running through the theme of time
So shockingly – so before you set foot there,
Take heed. This is the work
Of Byzantine silk slaves confined
To the palace grounds at Constantinople,
And you must beware.
There was a way station
On the Silk Road
Where the authorities executed
Traitors in a wooden box
In innumerable, unspeakable ways.
When you touch this shroud from the east
You take that hundred feet of road.
You must walk softly past.
You must try not to look.
The torrent of words – later, later.
Here tongues are cut out,
And that is why the howling
Is mute,
Gilded, herringboned.
Because although this is death,
It is the work of slaves
Whose task was only
To expose the maximum amount of gold thread
To the ceiling price of so many nomismata
Per square inch, in a swift mischief
Of curious knots, of mazes
Flashing past, of straight paths
Made inextricable,
So look again.
The angels wring their hands
Over a statue. They are deranged,
But not by grief. They mourn
Not a body, but a work of bronze.
They do not bring a mortal to the grave.
But we onlookers who grieve and grieve –
We cannot relegate this thought
To a glory woven cryptically
In heavy silks;
We cannot consign it, sweep it off,
For we cannot weigh
In our palms the empty cocoons,
We cannot study
Within the secret workshops
Of the silkworm,
We cannot touch the boiling
Water where the spools whirl,
We cannot learn firsthand
The bleakness of the craft
With which God made the world,
We cannot recount the legend that,
When they met face-to-face, both
God and the worm laughed.
Note: The title is from a description of the Thessalonikian epitaphios in Byzantium, by Paul Hetherington and Werner Forman (London: Orbis, 1983). Hetherington proposes that the epitaphios, an Orthodox liturgical length of cloth, was worn, perhaps, over the heads of priests as they approached the altar to celebrate the Eucharist. The epitaphios of Thessaloniki was discovered in 1900.
– Gjertrud Schnackenberg (Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992)
