Lake Effect

Lake Erie outing, 1916.

The dead loved me today,

Come from beside the lake
To this photo on my stairs
In their hats and Sunday clothes

To love me with operatic eyes,

My grandmother, narrow-waisted in white,

Pensive at sixteen, often at an angle,

Her brother behind her, thin and brooding,

Ill-suited, and the war coming,

Her sister lovely with her beau,

About to be married, unsmiling,

Thinking perhaps of her mother,

Ten babies and six living,

Thinking perhaps of the well-worn path

Between the washhouse and the kitchen.

They studied me from under their brims,
Lakelight on the tendons of their necks,
Dark eyes looking out from shadow,


The same. The same.


I heard my daughter's voice
As I washed her cheek, pixel by pixel,
Photo for the local sheet
To print with her obit,
Not so stark a task as you might think,
And less alone.


The dead loved me today.


Dark eyes. Dark eyes.

–May, 2008.

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