Renee Kalagayan
In my favorite photo of my mother’s father,
a khaki cap and pants walk away from me.
Slicked hair silvers over a head
red with earnestness. Beneath sprout ears thick with silence.
A burgundy shirt balloons in early winter air.
His musician’s feet shuffle a sad measure he cannot hear
on the road—like a burro’s body, wracked
with the weight of braying. My Papa is eighty
and kinder now. Before this moment
I had asked him, Could we take a walk?
Whether he heard me or not,
we went, his back bent in
the early evening’s tedium, scoliosis
patiently staking its crooked claim.
And I love the curve of his spine, pulling
his body forward, forward.
I imagine years from now, my own children
will ask, What did your Papa look like?
and instead of showing his face, I will show this
photo—the lean arch of his back, red swath of shirt,
noble as his blood, long length of weakening arms
that have held on so long to love—the way he walks
beside my mother, each slow for the other’s sake,
plodding little by little out of the shade
and into the sweetness of light.