Not Enough for Anything

Defend yourself against the tenderness.

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You’ve kept assorted photographic icons
from their lives, especially these two,
which date before the strange
unprepossessing small debut of you –

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the first: a view of both of them, just married,
posing on the wooden steps down from
the Mobile, Alabama church wherein the war

decreed they had to wed – your father
in his uniform, your mother in the prettiest
white hat and dress – hemmed at the knees –

as if this were the modern way of being free
and young and somehow just exactly as you
knew them, older, dying, years beyond –

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and then the second: portrait of your blond
and infant older brother, large-eyed, brimming
innocent suspicion, wondering what

anything could mean: looking up at mommy,
probably, away from camera lenses
and the odd expenses even now required

of living, giving just a touch of that bright
darkness which you saw in him years later,
wasted on his bed, all sores – morphine:

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the fact that they are dead is not the point
as much as how, although you’ve kept
the backs of their framed visions to the sun,
some ambient illumination has undone

them just a little – fading sepia to yellow –
and the pain is that these pictures bring
about as much as life can ever bring
and even that is not enough for anything.



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