Picturing
Weeks before your death
you cut yourself out
of family photographs.
Baby pictures show only
babies, no smiling mother.
Children hold onto empty
spaces, seeming silly.
Scissors move straight through
the middle of some: there’s my father
in front of the house, alone; there’s
the tree in the backyard full of flowers
with no one underneath it. It is as if
you wanted to see, exactly, how the world
would look without you. Cutting through
those pictures must have been like
opening a vein, the sharp point
making a furrow
right through the past.
But still I see you, in the parking lot
with the red and blue market
behind you; you smile at me
as I carry the packages. We open
the car doors, switch the radio on,
and drive away.
(Illustration incorporates an image from Flickr Creative Commons)
