For Concetta:
ANTHROPOLOGY
The photos arrive in the
mail.
Each sister sends one newly
found
so I can see our mother when
she was young then matronly,
standing on the hospital's
lawn.
They do it to give me
history,
to impress in my memory her
Kodachrome vitality.
Arranging
a chronology of missed years,
they dig for bones in cartons
drawers and cardboard albums.
I reconstruct in black and
white,
in color. She is almost
solid, fleshed
with each new fragment: the
infant
in her arms, the sisters
holding
her arms as she leaves the
hospital.
Here her smile is less
generous, more
tentative, her brows
narrowed.
This must have been just
after
the tumor blossomed, before
she lived from bottles and in
charts.
Hair by muscle, I build the
body
under which my girlhood lies,
below the carved stone. From
beneath
red clay, anthropologists
lift femur
and fibula, carefully dust,
arrange the ribs
of what lived, moved and was
buried. -- S.K.
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