Responding to Leo Touchet’s astounding black and white photographs of sand dunes in Death Valley and Texas, jazz funerals and festivals in New Orleans, and several other scenes, Jianqing Zheng’s ekphrastic poems capture and interpret the implicit movement in the images. The photographs and poems perform a splendid dance together, a tango or fox trot, on facing pages. The title of the collection, /Still Motion/, indeed, expresses the synergy of word and image.

The opening poem, “A Way of Seeing,” is written in a form that gives expression to the undulant, rippling nature of the dunes, Touchet’s sublime landscapes of light and shadow. It begins:

Those
sand
dunes

(tension
of time
and space

touch
of light
and shade

shape
of solitude
and company

look
serene
and jumpy....

The sway of the words mimics the waves of sand. The photograph and the verse together seem to collaborate in a sort of samba, dancing across the facing pages. The first ten ekphrastic duets are all based on these desert images. Zheng emphasizes the very act of seeing throughout his poetic responses to the photographs. “A Way of Seeing” is followed by poems titled “Questions from Seeing,” “The Visual Chord,” “Sight to Sight,” and “Seeing the Shadows.” As he writes in his introductory statement about ekphrasis, it “helps me focus on things, not ideas.”

Yet in seeing these images, his imagination is likewise stimulated. Five of the twenty-five pieces in the collection are haibun, a form that combines prose and haiku. “The Visual Chord” is one. It ends:

stranded on beach
a humpback whale
in desperate silence

Touchet’s accompanying photograph is “Mesquite Flats Sand Dunes” in Death Valley National Park, and the image certainly does resemble a beached whale, the way we see things in passing clouds in the sky; the light makes the rippled sand in the background of the photo appear to be a tranquil body of water stretching to the horizon while the darkened dune in the foreground could be Moby-Dick’s dark little cousin stranded on the shore.

“Ripple Effect,” likewise in response to a “Mesquite Flats Sand Dunes” image that depicts the windblown sand shifting, “a natural painting of lake ripples pushing on and on into more ripples stretching out of sight,” brings to the poet’s mind the vicissitudes of the economy and ends with the whimsical haiku:

pillow talk
about delayed retirement
delays sleep

The final sand dune-inspired poem, called “A Small Plant’s Valediction,” after Touchet’s “Monahans Sand Hills Dunes” photograph taken in Monahans Sand Hills State Park in Monahans, Texas, a close-up image of a small plant emerging from the sand, lying flat on the sandy ground, whose semi-circular ridges make the plant appear as if at the center of a clock (“I am an hour hand attached to your shaft”) is written from the plant’s point-of-view. “Dear Sand,” it begins, “don’t creep into sadness.”

“La Vie en Rose,” after a black-and-white close-up of a blooming flower that is reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe, starts a suite of Louisiana- based photographs. Louis Armstrong famously performed the Édith Piaf- composed song, a jazz reference that signals the shift in geographical and cultural focus. Touchet’s images of jazz and blues musicians in this sequence freezes the dynamism on the page, the very essence of “still motion.”

There’s the beautiful “Bourbon Street in the French Quarter” photograph of two small kids gazing up at something overhead, their eyes wide in astonishment. The smaller boy has his lips on a toy trumpet while the older boy, arm around the smaller boy’s shoulder, points at something in the sky (/Is it a bird? Is it a plane?/). Zheng’s accompanying ekphrastic poem is titled “Wonder.” It’s one of those brief moments a perceptive photographer is able to capture forever in film.

“Second Line at Alcide ‘Slowdrag’ Pavageau’s Jazz Funeral” is another. It’s an image of young men in full dance motion, parasols overhead, arms and hips swinging with abandon. Zheng’s poem, “Celebration,” is shaped like a rocketship, or a maybe a roman candle, a Mardi Gras firework; though it’s a funeral procession, they are celebratory, not somber. Zheng writes:

images
of
the Second Line

hip
&
hop

strut
&
booty bounce

rejoicing
the
dead

Zheng’s poem, “B.B. King” accompanies a photograph of the legendary blues guitarist Touchet took in 1972 at the annual JazzFest, King’s big infectious grin lighting up his face as he sits in an automobile. Outside the window we see fans looking on as the car passes. “Sunflowers bow with a hail,” Zheng writes.

A handful of other JazzFest photographs are included here, too, attendees frenetically dancing in one (Zheng’s accompanying poem is simply titled “JazzFest”), an audience sitting in the stands anticipating the performance in another (“Waiting” is Zheng’s ekphrastic poem).

One of the final images Touchet has captured is a silhouette of a man and woman kissing by the benches along the riverfront. “Lovers on the Mississippi Riverwalk” is paired with Zheng’s poem, “Being in the Moment.” The short poem reads:

Two lovers form a silhouette
in the halo
of the southern sunset,

heads tilting, eyes smiling.
Arms hugging
For a soulful presence.

She’s the crescent moon
throbbing
with his heartbeat,

and he Lake Pontchartrain
rocking her
into a mooring/ boat.

Still Motion/ is an aesthetically pleasing performance, the collaboration of a master poet and a master photographer.