Old Photographs

So this must be the color of the past: a light as amber as the whiskey in your glass,

the ice long melted. There: a tint of antique paper in the unsuspecting air,

embellishing the silhouettes and yellowing the glare into false jaundice.

Like dinner silver tarnished to a patina of brass, each shine has lost its polish

in the drawer where it was left: the teeth, the smiling eyes, the hair, the flash caught in old eyeglasses

once noted for their stylishness, now clownish, graceless, brash. Some things are ugly simply

for their earnestness. The face is yours, as are the hands, but only in their bone structure;

middle age has softened us at last. I stay with you there, almost handsome, proud

as the small shutter snaps. I’m elsewhere now, but I’m still aging from your photographs.