Here’s another wedding picture—a happy couple on a beach with a pretty mom—everyone smiling and alive. Not like my wedding where the Greek women wore black and my godfather excused them by saying, “Black is au courant.” Ever the bobcat and a fancy tom, Sam was the mysterious man wearing leather pants in my mother’s honeymoon pictures taken in a San Miguel Allende hacienda with my father, the man who slipped our grasp with a belt nailed to a door jamb fifteen years later.
Oh, daddy-oh, please don’t go to Poland. Too many ghosts and bones there—millions of bleached bones all over that once scorched earth. Nazi dirty work. Better go to France. Pere Lachaise has literary company. Be just your style.
You poet, you painter, you man with the eyes-as-blue-as-my-blond-headed dolls—I miss you.
I’d love to be back in the garden past the rows of aspidistra, me on the steps, you sitting in the butterfly-flamingo chair painting and talking. Maybe mama would materialize and bring her favorite brie and crackers. Sam, too, might reappear with his tall tales of the Rome opera house in the 40s.
And it would be we again before I became just one.