The black and white photograph
of my great grandparents
is so still in this house
where I sit after a day of labor,
laboring beneath crab apples.
Green grass paste covers my boots,
and dirt is caked beneath my nails…
The beer has been drunk,
and the pipe smoked
and I sit in this armchair
in the corner of the living room,
steady and silent.
Too early for bed
but too late for activity,
I wait
and the silver frame of the photograph
is like a window frame,
calling me into its pools
of light and dark.
The whole image is translucent grey,
peopled by metallic ghosts
and covered in a layer of living room dust.
I did not know my great grandmother.
I did not know my great grandfather.
And I never will.
Looking out my window into the night
I see the cafe across the street
where I often sit and observe:
it is closed, vacant, empty.
Beaded lights are strung over its tables and chairs,
pearls in a stream.
I picture the water
rushing over the perfect oval beads,
translucent ripples flow
green and incandescent over the pearls
as they sink into the mud of a riverbank.
My great-grandmother always used to wear
a necklace of white pearls around her neck.
I remember when we’d help her daughter,
my grandmother,
dress herself in the hot Florida room,
the stale heat trapped in the beige walls
like a comfortable tomb.
She’d take the pearls,
shiny and complete,
out of a brown Japanese lacquered box.
My mother would fasten the clasp
around the back of her mother’s neck,
and I imagine now the pearls being clasped
by the ghost of my great-grandmother,
the stout lady in the photograph…
She looks so sturdy.
Stolid, fearsome, and tender like a pearl,
weathered by a life of passage, of passing, passing.
My mother never did inherit the pearls.
I wonder where they have passed on to…
My eyes refocus
on the lights strung up outside,
hanging over the empty street,
and I imagine the lights
of a faraway ship on a turbulent sea
after the sun has set,
leaving the sky painted black,
with only a deep gash of blood orange red
on the horizon line.
This ship is a lone service station
set against the endless lonely night—
like the one we saw in late March on Long Island,
dejected high schoolers,
depressed and disappointed,
on the comedown of some trip.
I thought then, and I think now,
of the oil rig in Breaking the Waves.
I do not know why we are all always
broken.
I wonder what the ship over from Sicily
was like as she came,
cradling a warm child,
its face pale green from seasickness.
I imagine she was already thick and matronly then,
as in the photograph… No—
she was thin,
famished,
poor.
They entered Ellis Island
like schools of salmon
swimming up upstream.
I imagine the endless flows of bodies
in the dusty antechambers of the stately building,
all those voices, echoing (children, crying, the old, dying),
everyone lost and excited, dizzy with possibility,
like the feeling I get every year
on the first day of spring.
Those metallic ghosts move in a blur in my mind,
lost and anonymous, yet dignified somehow.
Suddenly the stream of images stop whirring
in front of my eyes,
like a lost daguerreotype
or magic lantern slides
without candle light.
We were pruning the crabapples today,
preparing them for blossoms,
preparing them for spring.
I wonder what his hands were like,
weathered by all those endless nights,
truck-driving across the ribbon of American roads.
I wonder if his hands looked like mine do now,
after a long day of working outside.
I hold the photograph and squint at it.
I hold it in the palm of my hand.
His brown copper skin has become darkened silver
in the printing of the photograph.
He is entombed within the silver frame.
He is Black. He is Native American.
No one knows.
We never could find out anything about him.
Not even stories told by the family.
I wonder when he met my great-grandmother—
that intrepid woman.
We have only this photograph,
and it is clear that he is not
white.
What courage must have shone in their harsh eyes,
what dinner table bravery,
what unconscionable American tolerance.
She would cook the whole family the biggest pot of sauce,
brewing as it was with love and hatred,
with tenderness and abuse.
All the external boots of pressure, pressing down
would be forgotten in their quiet moments
alone on the beach, drunk
listening to Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade”
under the silver moonlight
swaying together and
“very much in love.”