Thinner

Grandmom kept receipts, invoices, statements, bills,
bundled with now-decayed rubber bands,
placed there carefully by her gnarled hands,
stacked and boxed, 1992 Home Savings,
1952, here's a Valentine's Card from her children
and a letter from her sons in the orphanage
where she kept them, being too poor
to house them at home with their sisters,
now tiny black and white contact prints
from negatives so rich from silver
dimes practically spill out of them -
Mom at 10 months like every other baby
in the lineage, squint eyes and dark hair
held at a distance by her unsmiling father.

And here is another: Pete The Greek, Grandmom's step-dad,
his only photo, saved perhaps because his wife is in it too,
plus the laminated prayer card announcing his funeral,
Mary Mother of God on one side, his life in two sentences
on the other, only it doesn't say what she always called him
"that son of a bitch" with the calumny that can only come
from close acquaintance.

Here they are together in bathing suits at the beach, Grandmom and Grandfather
   (though it doesn't sound right, Grandfather, he never returned
   after the war, stayed in Hong Kong far from his children, Mom
   didn't say much the day he died, just sobbed into her hands
   for the only time I ever remember her crying)
their arms around each other, Joe tall and handsome, Jean nearly as tall
showing her legs, the sand blaring, and on the reverse, August 3, 1935,
and I count
which means this photo was pretty
much taken when Mom was conceived
which also explains why Grandmom's smile
was the widest in any of the images
until the one captured the day her baby
graduated from University.

Our days are thinner now.
Images don't count
as much as when 90 cents for a packet of photos
cost a day's labor, and the one-inch-square memory
tucked away in an old envelope
next to a child's scrawled note, kept safe for 60 years
sustained imagination and memory
and eyes thick with living