Here the formal times are surrendered
to the camera's indifferent gaze:weddings,
graduations,births and official portraits taken
every ten years to falsify appearances.
Even snapshots meant to gather afternoons
with casual ease are rigid.Smiles
are too buoyant.Tinny laughter echoes
from the staged scene on an articial
beach.And yet we want to believe
this is how it was:That children's hair
always bore the recent marks of combs;
that trousers,even at picnics,were always
creased and we traveled years with the light
but earnest intimacy of linked hands or arms
arranged over shoulders.This is the record
of our desired life:Pleasant,leasurely on vacations,
wryly comic before local landmarks,competent
auditors of commencement speakers,showing
in our poses that we believed what we were told.
But this history contains no evidence
of aimless nights when the wilderness of ourselves
sprang up to swallow the outposts of what
we thought we were.Nowhere can we see
tears provoked by anything but joy.There
are no pictures of our brittle,lost intentions.
We burned the nagatives that we felt did not give a true
account and with others made this abridgement of our lives.