There is a light and it is a beginning,
then a splash and the silence of water,
a mother emerging from a pool, your mother,
perhaps, pushing the hair away from her eyes
with fingers painted a fearless red. You say
this isn’t your mother, your mother would never
laze by a pool with waterproof fingerprints?
Then it’s my mother in a black one-piece swimsuit,
the back cut out like a puzzle piece, one scooped up
in a vacuum and never missed, the picture still clear.
And this is a picture: my mother laughing, dripping
pool water that seems freckled by the sun. Somewhere,
my father holds the camera and so is outside
the scope of this picture, though it, and I, seem
to search for him, perhaps in vain. And I’m there,
in the foreground, still an infant, watching
my mother’s lips pout at the camera, too young
to see her, so young I still remember my first light,
my first water, the silence at the beginning.
Does my father know she’s beautiful? Do you?
In the years, she’ll push the camera aside, we’ll replace
the pool with a sandbox and, then, when I’m too old
to remember water, the sandbox will turn
into a garden of cherry tomatoes. A new picture:
on her knees in jeans, her fingers and forehead
dusted by dirt, her hair covered by a small bandana.
When I took the picture, I still hadn’t realized
she’d been here long before I ever showed up.
Anthony Frame, an exterminator from Toledo, Ohio, is the author of one book, A Generation of Insomniacs, and three chapbooks. He is the poetry editor at Indianola Review, and his poems have appeared in Third Coast, North American Review, Blueshift Journal, and Verse Daily, among others. In 2014, The Ohio Arts Council awarded him an Individual Excellence Grant.