Dear Powder on the Mantle

The photographer rode into town on a bicycle, true, not a horse. He wore a rumpled-brim hat and bare feet. He told us the photo would fade over time. That was part of its beauty. I said: cool. I was answering from a time before, when I liked things that disappeared. When I made things disappear, so they’d be more beautiful. A time before sons. Our horses were tied up outside, is the lie, and we could hear them stamping and huffing. I paid the travelling tintype man with my grandmother’s green silk kerchief and one centavo. On our horse, with his arms loosely around me, Little Brother spun the kerchief round and round his wrist, admiring it. And I swallowed, blaming the dust. But really I hated the wild west. How boys could only admire a beautiful thing when they were young, or when no one was watching them. I can’t say the photographer swindled us, sold us a disappearing picture. Even though it’s now riddled with a million stars shooting diagonally and appears, over that, to be coated in powder. He warned us. And even when it’s blank glass I’ll snatch it from the flames. It speaks more loudly as it fades. It says, you were right to draw your boys in close, suspicious. To make your hands claws. Remember that small sternum bone, that knob of shoulder. Remember denim, remember cotton, remember buttons, remember boy bangs thick and sleek as you swooped them, futile mama, to one side. The faded image says the unbelievable thing I could never say. It declares: I loved you before any of us were here. My love for you was out there even then, like the tied horses, patiently impatient, all heat and breath, waiting.

(photo by Ian Azariah, TinTypeTrike)