The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2009

1948, my parents, dancing

fill their corner of the black and white photograph

found and mailed to me sixty years

after their nephew’s winter wedding

She wore the kind of Chinese silk—

"soft" and "undressed"—they called shantung

Her neck and ulna angled toward his arm's

reaching, the fine handkerchief just visible,

folded like a January flower,

a lick of flame

You can always see a face in the fire

some diarist wrote, lamenting a loss

I was 5 and with my sister, 2, undoubtedly

not there—home with the Irish girl

listening to the Irish Hour, Archbishop Richard J.

Cushing's "Hail Mary fulla grace" or not listening,

doing what she called "runnin' ‘round the rooms."

These were the parents young children rarely saw

Something racy, like a party downstairs,

the smells of chocolates in their bowls

and smoke of cigarettes, perfume, good Scotch—

We would watch from the hall, knowing nothing but

This is romantic. This is where we came from.

The snapshot caught them, paired, two panes

of the kind of window they name "true divided light"—

separated by the merest graduated seam.

Elizabeth Chapman