Does her dimpled-cheek delirium still thrill
you? Or her death escalate as you try to focus,
cataracts pixilating her image, static of hail
in late-day snow? Do her eyes ring almonds
of tender memory? Times I wrestled your camera
away so you’d stand with her. Mom’s little-girl smile,
head on your chest you contain her, blue-sweatered, small
in your bulky leather-jacketed arms. She secretly hated
your obsession. Told me so, yet smiled dutifully,
willed your Kodak to break open, admit its blindness,
thirsty glass eye hiding yours. These mounted prints—
all you’ve had of her for what, thirty years? Oh Dad, don’t
tell me how much time you’ve spent making these. I once
saw the camera as a time machine. Spring-loaded blink
of the metal blade, and your wife’s pale wrists perfected
in a clean-blue action of capture. The perishable flower
of her hand holding the tea cup. I’m here in this one, too,
inside her where you’d both put me one morning. Do you see
her that way in these photos— playful spoon-faced angel
caught here in her downward arc? She was eighteen then,
pregnant with me, hands on smooth hips, summer butterfly
blurred in wings— She breathed, vein-strapped and laughing
outside of these frames. You meant to keep her, negative
reversal, frozen safe onto film, canistered in this basket-
catch projection. I can still see her bunched brow curve
in search of you. You were busy slicing her light streams
precisely into thousandths-of-a-second. Did you know
the same light also falls on another? You do remember—
How a touch brought your cheek to her breast? Her milk
let down, the squirm of suckling you? Through your father’s
lens, your mother still holds you. Bound in two dimensions
here in high-neck bodice. Glacial in her lacy frame of virtual,
slate eyes still saying, I will never die, will never, ever leave
you. First image in a child’s downy head, yours. Now your turn
to leave the room— the walls, already ajar, turn and squeal
open on cast-iron hinges. What will become of all my pictures?
you ask me, the son you introduced to this craft of keeping.
Outside, the night moves on, closes its wings on the leaves
as they whisper in words neither of us comprehend. Now
the closet’s photo-albums fade. The bluish room wavers,
your camera on the dresser. I think of mine in my pocket,
how I have no albums but my computer. In your archive,
thinner and thinner each print unlayers itself transparent,
softening the edges of her sleeves as she enters. You touch
her smooth shoulder. Her watercolor face loses definition
and you smile. You pour out all the toy soldiers who grip
tightly their green plastic guns as they tumble from the mesh
gift bag. A Christmas morning long past, now somehow here
in your playground vertigo of parting curtains, slipping through
the dilation in your failing chest. I imagine death pleasing you
with its simpler lens-set, your awakening from a last soft image
engraved by the capture of actual light. Waves and particles.
Your Minolta’s titanium shutter blades as they fall from time
asleep, your widening into laughter at this blinding idea of keep.
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