Photograph

Title from Eagle*Seagull (MySpace)

This is actually three mini-poems.



Photograph I



I'm in the fourth row down, third from the right.

About a dozen people aren't looking at the camera.

We're looking at the guy next to me

with his pants around his ankles

and his ankles in the air

while he did a bare-assed handstand for our Senior photo.

In four seconds, he'll fall,

knocking a third of the graduating class

right off the bleachers.



Photograph II



My girlfriend and I are grinning

like a pair of Ronald Reagan caricatures,

holding hands with matching bracelets and

standing to the left,

a wide field of potential ahead of us.

In about a year and a half

she'll dump me outside a Ben Folds concert.

And I'll cry more because the smell of

marijuana and new t-shirts irritated my eyes,

and because I paid for the tickets,

than because we're breaking up.



Photograph III



My dad is, in a fit of irony, fixing a camera.

A cigarette dangling for the corner of his mouth

as he's caught in the middle of a throaty grunt

that sounds like the metallic twang of when

he spackled the stairwell three summers before.

In eight years he'll be diagnosed as terminal,

and his mechanical grumble will turn to a soft whirring,

and then to silence.