FAMILY ALBUM

The one in the background is Aunt Adela,
a worldly witch who lived at so many different times
even today I don't know if she's still here or not.
From this grandfather I inherited my name.
A rickety old oxcart snatched him from his village
to bury him a long way off.
I was born much later and still I remember him.
Luis the lawyer vanished suddenly
in the year of the plague. He left behind letters, postcards,
the map of a vague innocence.
Veronica is that one with a white fan
and the disdainful bearing that became her so well.
Of this particular José — there were several others —
no one knows when or where he perished.
He walked around screaming at his shadow on the roadway.
My dear King Richard looks much younger
than his death. And perhaps that's how it was. . .
In the lost land of my absent family
this almost invisible album I open and close
burns my eyelids as they watch over its dream.
Don't wake these portraits
till I can rejoin them forever
on the album's last page.