Old pictures, childhood in gray.  Easy to believe the world is colorless,
just patterns of shadow and light.
If I could capture an EVP of the past, my voice might come through
the static of all those years
in playback.  I wouldn’t listen, anyway.  I don’t set up cameras
to record dust in empty spaces.
The last thing I need to see is draft and drift, mist and mirage.  Funny
how yesterday is full of ghosts.
In this photo, I am a pale presence holding the pallid swaddling
of my sister. Neither of us
old enough to remember the colors of the world.  Outside this image
must be a cross-hatching
of darkness and illumination.  Doesn’t it figure?  The river ashen.
The trees a flutter of smoke.
Somehow, the clouds never change, as in the picture of my father
holding me off the chalky sand
at a beach in North Carolina, my hands over my ears to keep the wind
from whispering.  You can’t see it,
except for those loose strands of hair, swept up, washed out
in the bleach of the sun.
I don’t remember these apparitions, the barely shaded differences.
Everything is a matter of gray tones,
charcoal shadings of opinion.  And in this picture, my mother’s hair
is dark, black dress, white pearls.
She stands apart in all these prints, completely defined, unlike the rest of us,
fading in and out of dazzle and glare.
                        

One of my grandmothers was Jewish;
the other, Methodist in the last years of her life.
One of my grandfathers, I can only guess,

was Baptist, but the other was an atheist
until his deathbed conversion. To what,

I couldn’t say. My father is agnostic,
and my mother is the same by proxy.
My sister is Catholic-by-choice, not by birth.

Her husband was born knowing those saints,
but her neurodivergent son stood in a pew

and screamed that he hated church and everyone
in it. I like to imagine the only great grandmother
I ever knew was the last surviving

Old World witch with her knowledge of plants
and poultices, her love of animals and storms.

If, for some reason, I go missing, I will leave
clues to my rapture. Check the altar
of the kitchen counter, the books that bless

my shelves. There is scripture
in every scrap we leave behind.
                        

They act like children,
call me to tell on each other
as though I can do something,
anything, to make it all better.
My father says her cough is worse,

that she takes fits until she can
barely breathe. My mother says he can’t
remember where the doctor’s office is,
and he was there just last week.
There are thirty miles of crumbling road

between us, those hills and hollows
of memory that rise and dip
with years I didn’t know were lost.
She’s careless, and he’s set in his ways,
and I’ve started to think the worst,

that one day too soon
one of them will be alone in the house
with only the dog for conversation.
My father complains she ignores him,
and my mother is sure he’s going deaf.

I don’t know what to believe,
how much is truth, how much
is aggravation. Today, the heavens are
muffled by clouds, and a train horn blows
to keep me from crossing the tracks.