This poem is called "The Album."
Oblong, brown, embossed with gilt fleur-de-lis, stiff,
mildewed along the spine.
I opened it to look through the eye of its broken lens.
Clock faces, ancestors, towers of dripping sand,
bloomed halves, torrents of shadow.
Music pours from the holes in its pages--
opus, mazurkas, marches, the songs of my uncles,
the songs of the soldiers, my uncles,
who stood at eager and spitting play.
In the hot sun of the album the snapshots fade.
Picnic, the regatta, the wedding in the forest,
and all blanched, all lost.
Last horseman after the album, red eye,
unshaven, they twirl their reatas,
they lean forward on their pommels,
The weeks and days of our lives in their lasso's circle.
While the insolent, taunting, in a crown of cardboard,
the queen of diamonds leans from the album and calls my name.