My Husband Takes Some Photographs of Me

It's like coal in your stocking,

to open the yellow Kodak package

and find one dim disaster, then another; me

dead-faced and gloomy, almost invisible

with all my freckles gleaming like the Milky Way.

I opened the packet in the tiny back room

while he worked the register, the hum

of customers. He came and found me

sighing through the stack like a dismal fortune-teller:

No one could call this woman beautiful.

He took the photos from my hands

but hurried through them first

searching for-something; like the doctor

who fails to bring one life to light.

I knew he'd never let me see that face again,

fading around the mouth, the downward pull

so like her mother's gravity.

The girl he'd courted was a meager ghost

who held still in the eyes while the other

woman moved and said Cheese.

I'd seen her sometimes limping toward me

in a plate glass window; I had glimpsed her in the bottom

of a mirror when I stumbled out of bed unwary.

My poor Columbus, what a ravaged country to discover!

He held my head, he held my arms, in bed,

in the darkness; then we beheld each other

aging, muscular, and mortal, smelling of life

wrapped in a warm sheet. His eyes caught the gold

from the hall, dark blue and gray-blue

as the door swung shut, till I was staring through a black hole

but still his face was turned to me, like a white flower,

his eyes a flash of light.

Then I was safe in his arms for an instant,

drifting off. My husband takes a photograph of me.