The Wreck of the Photo Album

John Grey

We're leafing slowly through a photo album
of dead relatives, faded black and white
photographs, stiff family groups
with blurred parents and sepia children.
It is comforting to think
that some of them survives in us,
that the wriggled-up nose is my nose,
that the curled lip is yours.
But why does their skin seem so unskinlike?
Why do the faces fade right there
at the point where you could really know them?
We're uneasy with the childhood photos
of the ones more recently dead,
something too familiar in
those starch-white shirts,
the dresses floating below the ankles,
seamless with the muddy ground.
Their childhoods, dopey grins notwithstanding,
seem as sad as our own.
They're lost and drifting in these pages
like floating dolls and building blocks
in the ocean after shipwrecks.
Do they wash up on a shore, I wonder.
Are we that shore?