The photographer posed us in such perfect
arrangements—oval, diamond, fan—
rising up like ivy from the Doric column
of my mother or hovering like spokes
from my father’s head. We wore new clothes
and postures retrieved from choir
or assemblies as we knelt or stood
or balanced on the arm of a chair, adjusted
the angle of our chins, then turned toward
the umbrellas and tripod
and smiled.
When the proofs came back, they never
looked like us, as we slouched on the couch
sorting through them for those that made us
prettier or taller or slimmer than we were.
If the photographer could have caught us
on a usual day, with my sisters estranged,
me wary, my brother planning escape,
all of us avoiding my mother’s hand,
and my father outside on the mower, glad
to be anywhere else—it might have been truer
to how most of our life was lived,
to the time just before or just after
wishing that we were different.
Instead, we framed the wish itself
and hung it up on the wall, where it looked
lifted from a book, the one that said
this is how we tried to look this is how
we want to be remembered
as those strange people stared back at us,
so fond, so artless, so unlikely.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 4.
Deborah Pope has published four books of poetry–Fanatic Heart, Mortal World, Falling Out of the Sky and Take Nothing. Her collection, Fanatic Heart, was re-issued in the Classic Contemporary Series from Carnegie-Mellon Press. Her work has been in Poetry, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southern Review, EPOCH, Birmingham Poetry Review and Poetry Northwest, among others. She has also been awarded the Robinson Jeffers Prize.
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