Lela and Others

For Kirsten

Tonight you are away sleeping

in sea breeze, dreaming I think

of horses, and I remember

the other day when we went

through the old album,

remember talking as best I could

about that random evidence,

all circumstantial or less.

I knew most of the faces

but the occasions were lost-

Aunt Jenny shading her eyes

and standing on a rock

in the lake. Her dark ship

finally came in, I know, but why

was she there with black hair

and a trim figure I can't

recall?

We smiled at the pictures

of my father that my mother

cut in half, scissors trimming

away an old girl friend.

Was it Lela? The mysterious Lela,

the album's Madame X,

who turned up so often

in the early pages and then

dropped from sight for good?

There is always a Lela-

but who is Lela?-looking

as helplessly young as my father

looked at twenty-five.

More

evident even than Lela

was that cousin I never liked

who squinted at us from page

after page as if the album

were a chronicle of his

life in the sun. He's gone too-

a bad death in California.

We looked

at all the relatives on all

those lost days standing

by their cars as if pretending

to leave or arrive, car doors open,

feet poised on running boards.

In the pictures of the farm

there was an odd formality-

no clowning, no bottles tipped

to mouths, no uncles' hats

on children-the men

looking away from the camera

with their large bare arms folded,

aloof and distant.

There was that one

we both liked: your great grandfather

in a sepia field beside plow horses

and your grandfather in the middle

distance, the whole somehow

telling us of the brown mystery

of the lost, those powerful docile

Dobbins, those strong men gone

to dust.

Then a turned page caught

my breath-your grandmother

scarcely older than you are now.

I remembered every feature

and how they grew hazy

those last days.

We went through them

all and I became garrulous with

the garrulous uncle, tough and wild

with that crazy cousin, cunning

with one aunt, tight-fisted with another,

and spoke sotto voce of that great aunt

who went bad in Butte, Montana-

the whispered family skeleton no longer

even a whisper.

I felt them all converge

with their broken stories and the past,

with Lela's slim hand, gripped

my wrist an instant then let go.

And our past mingled in, offering up

my memory of your birth

and how some long tension, some

crimped deep fiber in me

relaxed for good when you arrived.