WEDDING DAY

 (for my mother on her 90th birthday)

Without the mirror inside

a camera isn’t a camera.

This photograph is like a camera

memorializing this special moment.

The mirror makes it so.

This is my mother

on her wedding day,

January 31, 1954.

I am eight years

from being conceived,

not even an inkling

in her mind’s eye,

and yet I feel 

in this moment 

as I look upon this image

that I am being made. 

That I am seen. 

That I am becoming real.

My mother’s refracted look, 

one of beauty, grace and possibility,

meets me so completely

I feel like a different kind 

of marriage is taking place 

between seer and seen.

As long as this photograph 

is in the world

and there is

someone to see it

there will always  be

a wedding underway

between my mother 

and whoever her beholder is,

between beauty, grace and possibility

and the intersection 

of the past and the present 

in the present.