I hesitated

before untying the bow

that bound this book together.

A black book:

ALBUMS

CA. AGRIPPA

Order Extra Leaves

By Letter and Name

A Kodak album of time-burned

black construction paper

The string he tied

Has been unravelled by years

and the dry weather of trunks

Like a lady's shoestring from the First World War

Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen

Until they resemble cigarette-ash

Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite

Now lost

Then his name

W.F. Gibson Jr.

and something, comma,

1924

Then he glued his Kodak prints down

And wrote under them

In chalk-like white pencil:

"Papa's saw mill, Aug. 1919."

A flat-roofed shack

Against a mountain ridge

In the foreground are tumbled boards and offcuts

He must have smelled the pitch, In August

The sweet hot reek

Of the electric saw

Biting into decades

Next the spaniel Moko

"Moko 1919"

Poses on small bench or table

Before a backyard tree

His coat is lustrous

The grass needs cutting

Beyond the tree,

In eerie Kodak clarity,

Are the summer backstairs of Wheeling,

West Virginia

Someone's left a wooden stepladder out

"Aunt Fran and [obscured]"

Although he isn't, this gent

He has a "G" belt-buckle

A lapel-device of Masonic origin

A patent propelling-pencil

A fountain-pen

And the flowers they pose behind so solidly

Are rooted in an upright length of whitewashed

concrete sewer-pipe.

Daddy had a horse named Dixie

"Ford on Dixie 1917"

A saddle-blanket marked with a single star