Finding the photograph among boxes
we’d packed and stored away some years ago,
we thought the context lost, as move on move
we filled our homes with goods that were our lives.
It showed us smiling at Niagara Falls,
youthfully larking through Dominion Day,
our thoughts turned liquid in the water’s flow
as if lost in the rush of the descent
and pulled back to our selves by friendly ties.
The feeling was like what, as a small child,
we’d felt appealing to St. Anthony,
his statue holding one rib of the church,
and finding a lost lucky friend returned.
We took it as a gift to memory
from greater forces waiting to be tapped,
the water’s drenching spray and constant roar
approval of the course our life would cut.
Smiling, you slipped it back where it had been.
Source: Treasure was published in the Sewanee Review, vol. 124, number 1, Winter 2016