On Finding Old Photos
It’s possible, at first glance,
(and then
a longer tucking in,)
to fall in love with the pause,
and then with the soft as gosling
fade on their face, their lips,
how they ask
nothing in their looking out
but the staying of shade,
how years into simply looking
they will not so much intention
as continue listening--
these photos, they put me
to wonder, if I held
them to my cheek and ear and lips
wouldn’t feel and hear
the breath let out and retrieved.
Some photos, long long
into the sepia curl of their age,
the old bones weighted down
and blown over by oblivious winds
and all these years of heave
and sod. Listen: this is their brief arriving,
their quickening return.
The long retreat of sea
or creek and its coming away
is our own random debris of memory
scattered like the tended/neglected
glass or shell consequence lays
at our feet as we happen by, taken
up by our own lives. And as it is
with unexpected treasures
aren’t we as quick to our lips
or our ear, and because the edges
are rubbed off, because it’s smooth
inside, and quiet as low tide,
isn't the breathing hard at first,
and the mist of it caught
by all familiars, a shock quick to go
to a soft pause and then hello, and welcome home.
We’ve waited such a long time
for you to arrive again.
