Ancestors in a Nineteenth-Century Album - Michael Sharkey

[highlyeccentric]

1. Great Aunt

Nothing in the background can distract
from the profile taken from the right.
She stands erect as if her feet and walking stick
were rooted in the earth, but the image lies.
How does the ghost of a limb removed
feel heat and mud and grass of a riverbank
tickling toes and heel? The trace of a smile
says what you see is a cheat.
The art is in the time we take to be haunted
by the pose enough to ask why she preferred
to seem the obverse image of a coin
whose other side we'd never see.


2. Great Grandparents

Her older siblings stand stiff-backed as she:
it was the custom of their class. The cousin
in the shadow wears the face kicked by a horse
while yet a child: no prospects there but pity
of her family and the gossips for five decades
still to come: let that be warning, don't run wiled,
do not provoke. And him with the boots
and suit and face he wore when he put his feet
on the table when he came home drunk from
the club in a sulky drawn by the horse he took
from the shafts and thrashed with a paling
torn from the fence to teach the beast obedience.

3. Family Secret

Now himself in the chair at the front with
expressionless wife beside him;
two belle époque-frocked daughters happier,
half recline on the carpet;
taller son in the back row with a what am
I doing here face, and his brother who is soft,
and the teenage daughter old in thought
and not to be baulked, who looks at the camera
made to celebrate her. Elder daughter, look
of a police informer, stands beside her, bible
clutched, and a mouth that has sucked a citron:
it is hers, that child that her mother holds and gives out
as her own, that solid churl with a baby's mask.