Photo Album

for Lena

Living is more dangerous than anything. – Randall Jarrell

One old photograph looks pretty much like another.
What difference whether it was your mother, or hers,
I held in my hand that unbearable summer night?
Time erases, and faces get lost. What remain,
Unchanging even as faces change, (though every
Bit as doomed) are pictures like this one, frozen
For as long as late-summer cicadas hum in your head:

The light was burning in the kitchen. Cars went by.
The television was on, the sound turned down low.
In the next room lamplight fell on the piano keys.
You showed me that photograph: Russia, the fifties,
чёрно-белый. Yes, your mother was beautiful.
On another, happier night, it might have brought out
Your volume of Pushkin, or an old recording.

But that night, no—it was an ambush, unwelcome,
Bringing to mind another, far, suddenly so far away—
Brando in the old film Sayonara never knew such angst—
Like the shock of familiar writing on crumpled paper.
What happened next dismayed you, but then, both of us
Forgetting momentarily that grief is as ephemeral as joy,
You spoke softly to the silly drunk in your arms.

Kelley Dupuis
1/24/97