Where families go to be families, unseen and unseeing

 

The photograph has all of its teeth,

it’s an elf, a brief elf. The sun makes pale

the over-constructed nose, the wispy hints of vanishings.
It’s an age trap where you look back

and say where did that animal go?

Its tendrilous aspirations and the extra inch of lip.
We pay for it now.

A strange forest goes up and up

and people have not made it to themselves

even after all that running.
The sky has become a pin-prick through the musk

residing over buried enchantments, photographs of air

and the creatures that used to be in them.