Today is My Parents' Wedding Anniversary
In their wedding photos, my mom and dad
are kids, all trapped energy and white surfaces.
When I was in college, their friends joked
that they looked like pictures of me marrying
my mom, which spoke, I think, to both Mom's
failure to age and my physical similarity to Dad.
So now I look closely for myself there, checking
the fabric, but I cannot easily find Mom and Dad
because, of course, in this formal black and white
moment, in the dress and tuxedo, they are other
people, unwound from the woven progress, the
woof and warp that made their complex tapestry.
These are not my parents, not the people who
drove the red station wagon or gardened vegetables
in the co-op, and hosted late-night cocktail parties,
not the parents who went skinny-dipping in July,
not the adults who sang together in reviews, who
translated Willie Nelson into German, who acted
in readers theater and taught art classes and hosted
writers workshops, not the parents who remodeled
their old farmhouse, chaired organizations, gathered
so many friends around them, lost their own parents,
who dropped their children off at college and made
a home that children, grandchildren return to.
This is a photograph that cannot contain my parents,
cannot reference me, or my sister, any of us, though
I imagine the echos that follow from Mom's bright
confidence, from Dad's familiar, if goofier, smile.
It's so obviously fresh, that they became entangled
that day, threads that would not disentangle, but
my thread, Kristen's, haven't even been spun here,
so the subjects of these photos are, in a sense,
unknowable, in their reality, only referenced in
a few stories that serve as shortcuts, context for
a life these two could never imagine, so I am looking
through a window, rather than glancing into a mirror.
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