In The Portrait Gallery
They stare at me, unblinking, their cracked eyes
sometimes calm, sometimes crazed. They are always
facing me, or turning towards me; they have been waiting
for me, it’s true, and it seems so cruel that when we finally
meet they have nothing for me, that their eyes don’t light up
at long last, they don’t complete that turn or stand up
from that bow or finally, finally let their cracked lips turn
into a smile, open a little as if to speak, even frown or grimace
and draw their eyebrows down as though what we did mattered,
just a little, and we would know whether to be proud of our buildings
and our bombs, the rising murder rate in Baltimore or the latest
Pulitzer-Prize-winning author or even the fact that, for the first time
in my entire life, the Tigers have made it to the World Series.
What better brother or sister are they waiting for, then?
Don’t they know that they, too, are slowly fading, their colors
dimming, their skin flaking away? In a few months,
they will be taken away, covered in shrouds and stacked
in dark rooms. In their place will be great silent spaces,
photographs of mountains in black and white, strange angles
of telephone wires against clear skies, things that are expected
to say nothing.
