Titles on a Family Portrait

I.
Last I visited, asked, "May I take a family portrait?"
He ripped it from the album. Mired in the fifties
the image is poised, provincial. A young architect, wife,
two sons, daughter. A great-dane fills the lower third

of the frame. Mother died and father and I had nothing
to say. I have the black and white now. The composition.
Another daughter not in the picture (not yet born) augurs
the presence of something unembodied. Absent. If it were

not for the wolfish lummox, a canis unfamiliaris, cheerful
but not quite a Philadelphia, Main Line nuclear unit.
Had the dog been a retriever, the chair chintz-covered
carved mahogany instead of mohair and chrome, normal.

Different more than similar. I wished the group had fit
the frame. Closer examination of the photograph reveals
books running along shelves in the background; a library
of titles, a theatre back-drop, whose burgundy, navy

II.
and olive spines seem to set a familiar tone for a drama;
a two-volume set in red morocco. Red in memory not black
and white. Dreaming in color signals prescience, in this case
for the past, obscured as future, waivers between memory

and truth. The five actors in this scene, faces once in
high contrast, foreground, now sun-faded yellow.
The cardboard brittle with age, the image formal,
posed, once silver-framed gathered dust atop a piano.

Viewed from a distant angle, each identity negated,
in a blackened mirror that shows peacock colors
like tarnished silver. From this oblique perspective
the participants appear as strangers. Clouded, hazy

a magnifying glass pulls the picture back into focus
reveals another set of books with S's along spines
memories; leafing through color plates, Sunday art
appreciation and afternoons spent with family. Tipped,


III.
The lens distorts faces into fun-house grotesques. The naked
eye reveals a well-groomed man; father standing left of mother,
his wife seated upon a mid-century modern "Womb" chair, her
legs crossed at ankles. She's flanked on either side by two sons

perching on the chair's arms. On her right (I am) the youngest,
smiling wiggler at six, tucked close beside her, hand around his
waist holding him in place. She divides the elder son, the eight-
year-old, who hovers tentatively to her left, from the younger.

The eldest son half-seated, separate, directly under the father
his winsome gap-toothed smile nearly a grimace, a dead-eyed
arrogance directed into the lens of the camera, emboldened, his
father's hand firmly on his shoulder, standing, presiding over

the group. The oldest child, a daughter whose indeterminate,
position, seated on a footstool, mimics her mother's lady-like
composure, ankles crossed, but a smirk belies impish parody
as if to mock the rest. Her gaze wanders out of frame.


IV.
The tilted smile suggests she sees something others can't
will not. An abstract geometric painted by the father-architect
above the fireplace puzzles. It heightens his proud expression
hints at modest success and hidden insecurity about heritage.

The scheme suggest a house designed in exploded view;
Different aspects revealed simultaneously; attic, basement,
court-yard, not enfilade, but at once. It's a backdrop on a stage
set on the mantle where a ditto pair of portrait miniatures

antecedents, mimic my parents. My mother's doppelganger
has a lip like hers, slightly swollen into a moue. Both gone now.

To be continued...