Lost Then Found Photograph of My Parents

Abstract

Lost Then Found Photograph of My Parents Stanley Plumly (bio) The bleached-out background sky is infinite, as the picture, like all pictures, seems freestanding, and, like all pictures, will, sooner or later, be an image of the dead, including the scythe-like curving of a car roof, plus part of the post between the two car doors right behind them: it’s probably a Chevy thus a comedown from my father’s Ford convertible, the one my mother’s driven into a tree, at a slow, courtship, side-street sort of speed. This is marriage, this is still the thirties. Whoever’s holding the camera—a Brownie Hawkeye?—has disappeared as well, on this, I think, a wedding day or a day just after. They’re dressed in coat and tie and something office formal to make the bride look older, with a handkerchief emerging from a pocket at her heart. Neither one of them seems happy, unhappy, or unsure, simply unaccustomed to what, in fact, just happened, death-do-them-part, my father’s squared-off shoulders supported on each side by crutches, an accident of timing, as most things in a life tend to be, my mother, on his left, with her faithful look of faith, since pictures never lie, looking straight at us. [End Page 23] Stanley Plumly Stanley Plumly is the author of the forthcoming collection Against Sunset (W. W. Norton, 2016) and The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (W. W. Norton, 2014). He is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. Copyright © 2016 Middlebury College Publications