astride a broken mule,
yellow now in the photograph,
between her brother Arthur
and sisters Lillian and Esther,
the smallest cowgirl on Clark Street
and the saddest of the children
posed against a lilac bush
in their own front yard
by the traveling photographer
who brought around each summer
this absurd lawn ornament,
this compliant mule, onto which
each child in the neighborhood
was lifted
for the space of an exposure,
just as, later, her son would be
and later still myself
onto a pony, the same look
of glum apprehension mixed
with fantasies of outlaw glory
as though our north Ohio streets
all led to Tombstone or Boot Hill.
The blurred house behind her
in which she lived as a girl
is like the house in which she lived
as a wife on a street
just off Clark Street
where I sit asking myself
the same old questions—
whatever became of Arthur,
had I never met them?—
shuffling the clues I have
like a pack of photographs
of faces I just can’t keep straight,
they look so much alike,
the difference one of background,
of mules or ponies,
of one street or another.
The day she had this picture taken
she sat in a white shift,
black stockings and shoes,
under a Mary Pickford haircut
atop a mild beast
in deference to someone’s idea
of the picturesque,
that familial look of gloomy prescience
on her face, as though she
no less than I
knew what was in store for her
once she dismounted—the years
squandered in schools
through which her son
and grandson too would pass,
in rooms and yards in which
she’d play or work
year after year, along streets
whose only change in forty years
would be paving, the shapes of cars,
and the costumes worn by those
who worked or played behind the hedges
walling in each house.
The years
of playing someone’s wife
stole her son, and moved
for three months into a rented room
six blocks away, not letting her son out
even to go to school, afraid
his father would follow him home
and find her, which eventually
he did.
The years, years later,
spent curled, corralled, upon a sofa,
smoking and watching television,
never leaving the house, hardly ever
leaving the sofa even to change
the channel, the house running to ruin,
the sofa cushions stuffed with Kleenex
and covered with cigarette burns.
And the years between those years—
before drugs and electroshock
had dragged her back into herself
and everyone pretended not to have seen
the things they saw, before
news of my daughter’s birth
caused her to laugh aloud to learn
of one more child saddling up—
when every afternoon
she gathered rocks
from neighbors’ driveways,
lugging them home in sacks
like a crazed prospector
and talking to herself, herself
a subject of conversation
in every house down the block
when all the husbands had returned
from work and she returned
at the photographs
upon her yellowed walls
or to chat quietly
with people on the ceiling
whom only she and I could see.