Self-Portrait as a Photograph of my Father
Today, the seedpods on the Milkweed
growing along the road between the airport
and the place my grandparents will die
began to open themselves, imperceptibly,
as if each were the beak of a baby
crane at the first change in pressure that comes
with their mother’s circling descent. I saw them like this
from the window of my father’s Buick, saw each
one of them pass us by, their cracked
mouths and eyeless heads, and said
nothing. Soon, after watching my father stand
in unsteady synchrony with his father,
I will lift myself from the davenport in the lobby,
and head for the patio where I will stand at my father’s
left hand, his father’s right, and I will smile
for the camera, not noticing how the seeds on the silver
maple behind us have nearly matured. How some
have already detached themselves from its branches,
have begun their slow, spinning fall.
We smile these facsimile smiles, lips taut
over straight, white teeth, because we feel
a sort of pressure in the air: something that tells us
that we are mortal, that we will be here
forever.
Self-Portrait With My Dead Sister
There is a girl and a boy sitting on a curb
next to the ocean somewhere in Oregon
where the rain, which has just stopped, has caused
a mud puddle to form in the foreground, just in front
of the boy’s white shoe: his pants
are blue, his jacket is red, and he is not
smiling at all, which I think
is what makes her faintly upturned lip
look so much like a smile.
Never mind that these people were real,
that one will grow up and keep on being real,
while the other will grow up and be dead.
Never mind the brusk presentation or presumptuous
implications the speaker in my poem employs:
he should be excused on account of his grief,
and frankly, it’s probably for the best
that we ignore him and just stick to the facts. For example,
the boy is nearly five years old, which makes the girl
nearly seven years old, which makes it nearly 15 years
before she drove past a stop sign and then,
didn’t do anything ever again.
Despite the fact that here, she has just
pulled her legs into her chest, has just set her chin
on her knees, turned up the corner
of her lip, and here it seems as if she could,
for a moment, break through the artifice of time,
the static nature of her disposition, and say something
utterly irrelevant, something
I won’t pretend
to understand.
____________________
Caleb Curtiss is the author of A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). His writing has been published in, or is forthcoming from, New England Review, The Literary Review, DIAGRAM, Green Mountains Review, TriQuarterly, Passages North, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.