Secure the Shadow

The photograph contains the whole of it:

he wears a white gown that might have been

for the christening, no shoes, his plump hands

posed, folded, dimpled, the hands

of a healthy child, the face still round with baby fat.

Whatever took him, then, took him quickly—

whooping cough, pneumonia, a fever,

something common that left no mark, and while

the posture is of sleep, the heavy-lidded

inward gaze of the eyes, not quite closed,

makes no pretense of it. She might have lived

to be one of the women expressionless

in other photographs. She might have borne

other children who lived and in surviving her

let go this image they must have feared. And so

with some reluctance, I purchase its further

removal from them, from her—making mine

this orphaned but still secure correspondence

with all that is about to disappear.

The caption’s rough cursive records that the girl

in the photograph has been dead nine days,

the mother refusing to part with her only daughter—

the rigor having come and gone, the body

posed seated, posture flawless—head turned

so that she gazes away slightly to her left,

at something just beyond the gold-embossed

frame in thoughtful enthrallment. Nine days

since the first night of this, the bathing, viewing,

and then the desperate bed of ice, until

the mother at last succumbed to insist on this

familiar: a book in her daughter’s right hand,

her left thumb holding down the page, place marked

as though in a passage to which she will return.

The photographer may not enter this house,

the boy dead from scarlet fever, so the closed

window also frames the body, shutters

open wide as though for light. He lies

on top of the made bed, wearing his winter

jacket and a scarf, hair neatly combed, face toward

the lens, even as his gaze disobeys, as though intent on

the stubborn sky instead, refusing this.

This one a stereo card, the girl

appears to the naked eye doubled, lying

on her side in a bed all white, beneath

a dark-filled window curtained with delicate lace.

In her arms a cat, quite alive and nervous—

mouth open—blurs its face in the turning,

about to escape this embrace made strange.

Around its neck—the bell she had fastened,

to keep safe the birds she might have loved

in equal measure, perhaps, or merely

decorative, the small cheerful sounding

of return, the smaller sound of vanishing.

Some of the youngest children have wasted

into the appearance of the very old,

the simple failure to thrive common

as it is irreversible, and so time

for a photograph before as well, taken

with toys, a rocking horse or doll, a wicker

carriage or favorite pair of shoes—one child

posed in a high chair with a bowl and spoon.

And some have their hands tied as though in bondage;

this is, the photographer’s notes instruct,

to prevent displacement, the slow-certain

restlessness of the body that does not die.

these smaller chambers crafted of gold, silver,

and skeletal leaves, only so many ways

to look until the light changes, fades, is lost,

the pane—the lens—darkening from glass to mirror,

until the substance of the eye sees itself

outside the self, and then can look no further.