Photo+Poem6

The three model poems are listed below. Please post your own poems by clicking on the "Discussion" tab at the top of this page, and then copying and pasting your poem as a post. If your wiki username doesn't contain your own name, please include that in the post, as well.

After-Glow by Raymond Carver

The dusk of evening comes on. Earlier a little rain had fallen. You open a drawer and find inside the man’s photograph, knowing he has only two years to live. He doesn’t know this, of course, that’s why he can mug for the camera. how could he know what’s taking root in his head at that moment? If one looks to the right through boughs and tree trunks, there can be seen crimson patches of the after-glow. No shadows, no half-shadows. It is still and damp… the man goes on mugging. I put the picture back in its place along with the others and give my attention instead to the after-glow along the far ridge, light golden on the roses in the garden. Then, I can’t help myself, I glance once more at the picture. The wink, the broad smile, the jaunty slant of the cigarette.

Saliva

I found the picture frame in the shelves of your basement closet, the one with you and your class of fifty-eight, the dusty one, and I blinked when I saw how open your eyes were, how the smooth skin on your forehead caught the light of the flashcube.

You were in your twenties, creased in the first suit you bought with your own money, there, eyes wide, lips slightly pursed, like you nodded in agreement to what the photographer just said about the upcoming election, the spell of rain this past week, about lawyers these days.

There’s little doubt you could see in the whiteness of that flash how your whole life stretched out before you, clean and unstained, bright concrete roads and blank pages in the planner.

I’m sorry, Dad.

Sorry I didn’t rush back to tell you, warn you about the trembling hands, the scrawled birthday thank-yous, the pills in the custard dishes on the kitchen counter and the post-it notes trapping the day hour by hour.

I would have told you to practice walking upright even then, to hold the saliva in your mouth, to practice recalling the names of your nephews, slowly, audibly, clearly.

On Finding a Picture of My Grandmother by Kate Glass

You drive across the Missouri state line in an old pick-up truck, a bottle of whiskey resting between your legs. You were on your way to Kansas City, the only city you know and the wind blew your hair out the window. Perhaps he had his hand on your knee, and one on the steering wheel as he pulled on to the turnpike. And maybe he told you then that this was your lives—the two of you the night and full throttle of the engine as you sped farther and farther away from Littleton toward a place where the buildings were taller than the trees and the jazz was so loud it made your heart pound inside your ears. When you got there, it was as if you knew you'd never go back, that your mother was right about boys like him, that your life was happening right then. Maybe that's why you asked him to take the picture—the one that's dotted with starts, or maybe it is just old and wrinkled but the one that I always think of when I suddenly remember that you could have once been my age. The one with the slender girl sitting on the hood of the car, a triumphant smile on her lips, the marriage license in her hands.