Correspondence

In faded photographs you don't have 
but still clearly remember, everyone 
is facing straight at the camera but not 
smiling: uneasy truce after noisy
quarrels behind closed doors, lips 
drawn tight as the secrets they took 
with them into the grave. You can smell 
the must of the grandmother's lace mantilla, 
the wool of the father's coat. You can see 
the carefully filed points of the mother's 
nails, the veins that were starting to show 
on her hands. Each of them could have been 
a key to a row of doors, each of them 
could have been a yellowed note slipped 
into a secret pocket or the inside of a hem.   
They've left, but now and again they appear
in dreams, in the sudden craving for a taste
from another time, in the lines of an old 
song whose refrain seems familiar
though it was all before your time.