Family Portrait

Jan Seale

October 8, 2021

Certainly the white-haired grandparents

with their naturally rounded  bellies

will have dropped out of the picture

but what of the father on the left 

who sired the four almost-tall teenagers?

He is absent  by way of a troubled heart

and his daughter in short-shorts

as befitting the summer day this picture

was taken now gone to some heaven

the rest of us are not. Another father 

far right, contributing the three sprouting lads?

A ghost, only his music remaining.

Two sisters, who started it all, smile giddy,

hold hands in the success of the outing.

The six who are left have long been stretched out

of their teenage skins, stretched to a day’s work

and incurable conditions, to poor plumbing

and trips to the vet and the hardware store,

to the band hall and the football game. But

look at them here in their matching striped shirts,

one boy on his knees (so as to get everyone 

in the picture) who doesn’t know that he’s kneeling 

in prayer for the falling away of the principals 

and for his car-wrecked big sister, for the

eventual falling away of everyone here to make room

on the photographic paper for the next batch 

to come cheerfully, innocently, to occupy 

the frame, which is in fine condition even 

after so many years and can be refilled again 

and again on this pale blue dot sailing the sky.

Jan Seale, the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate, lives in Texas on the U.S.-Mexican border. She has held a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and has served as a Humanities Scholar for Humanities Texas. Her latest book of poetry is PARTICULARS: poems of smallness, published by Lamar University Literary Press.