Austin Wilson: Two Poems about Photographs

                        Frederica, Easter, 1934

            The sisters stand in front of the old fort,

            lined up in their Easter dresses,

            taffeta ribbons in their hair, new

            shoes, at least on my mother, the oldest,

            the others in hand-me-downs given

            the year, as maybe the dresses were, new

            each year for her, Mother, a decade
            from being called that, the younger sisters
            each wearing what the next older girl

            had worn Easter the year before, or a previous one,

            the pastels of their clothes the same

            color in the black and white photograph.

            They stand in the order of their ages

            and their heights, like some trick time-lapse photo

            of the same girl, showing how she’d grown,

            like the marks made on the kitchen doorframe

            each year.  My mother, ten, is posing, her feet

            positioned in a v, her arms out, a distance

            between her and my aunt, two years younger,

            who whispered in my ear that she was my real mother

            time and time again.  My two younger aunts reach out

            as if holding hands if the shutter had clicked a little later. They seem

            happy, smiling to the camera, to my grandparents, who must

            have urged them to, or at the baskets outside the frame

            where they could see them and I can’t, full of all

            the colored eggs they’d found hidden in Christ Church

            graveyard.  Behind them, the ruins of the old fort,

            its arch collapsed into the dark mouth of a cave. 

           

                        The Negatives

                         

                                        1.           

The packet held the negatives

in a pocket—cut-up dark film in strips,

two shots on each—the black and white photos

themselves pulled out, scattered or lost, 

like the camera, stolen on the trip,

its body pebbled black like the cover of a bible,

a roll of film inside.

                                    2.

My mother, the dark matter

of her life, her death,

these negatives spread out

on the floor between my brother

and me, each of us with a cardboard liquor-store box

taking turns claiming her effects.

                                    3.

The first negative held to the window,

a bullring: first, the exterior,

over the entry, an arch made

like a horseshoe, good luck perhaps,

but dark like the sky,

the street a sheet of ice.

The other, inside the ring, a toreador in a suit of darkness,

black studs and sequins, embroidered with even darker thread,

his skin and hair shining white, the cape a flash of light held out

towards a whitened bull, its lowered horns black, the arena’s gravel

dark except for the bullfighter’s and the bull’s pale shadows,

like something, milk, spilled beneath them.

                                    4.

My brother was three and I was eight

on the trip to Mexico I try to reconstruct: a trip

he doesn’t remember without our father,  the heat of the car,

a black Mercury, no air conditioner, triangular wing windows

on the front doors blowing hot air, buffeting us,

our hair mussed, dirty, bugs flying in, Mother’s hair wild.

An escape, I think now, across the border, a separation,

a quickie divorce. Who knows?

                                    5.

A cathedral where light was dark and darkness light,

shots of me and my brother, our skin darker than the lightened skin

of the Mexican children crowded around us on the steps,

everyone’s hair silvered as mine is now, sixty years later,

when I write this, twenty years since the negatives

came into my hands, my mother just laid in her early grave,

on the island of the dead, in the last place of her family’s plot.

                                    6.

The brightness of that arid landscape

shadowy.  The cacti silver ornaments,

trophies, candelabra, thorns spark bright flames.

                                    7.

A courtyard, a fountain tossing black water,

an espaliered tree, its trunk shiny against a wall so dark

it must have been white stucco.

Her black and white polka dotted sundress

reversed, her skin deeply tanned,

a stranger, a plantinum blonde.

                                    8.

A dark man exists only in my memory,

no photograph or negative of him

in what she left behind. They danced

in the hotel bar.  He joined us for meals

and showed us the city and then his house

on the side of a mountain.

He turned my brother and me loose

in a gym in his basement.

The white canvas of the boxing ring would have appeared as a dark pool

in the negative if someone had been there

to take our picture.

                                    9.

We were on the restaurant balcony overlooking the sea

watching young men dive into the dark water

from a cliff below us.

Later, a taste of Mother’s chowder,

cream of unborn octopi, she said, teasing me,

looking at the man sitting across from her,

our host, who had laced the boxing gloves

that were too big on our hands and urged us

to fight, then left us standing in the ring,

our arms at our sides,

while he showed her the upstairs.

                                    10.

I imagine the cream of the soup becoming ink,

hiding the unborn young,

who swim away, deeper into the darkness.