Daguerreotypes
Father's Side
I. MARIA, 1916 In the creased postcard she is pregnant with my grandmother. She wears an oil black pleated dress in early spring. A little girl with pale blue eyes poses beside her on a marble bench in a borrowed twin- ruffled frock, a ribbon in her hair badly tied and knocked askew. Her husband sits in his only suit, stiffly proud, meeting the glare of the world, his mustache curled. Has Maria told her daughter in Italian to stand still? A few years before she came to this country and married a man she'd never seen. From under her extravagant hat I see a few soft dark curls rioting free. Are all these old pictures just the same - people whose blood you carry in your veins as tenuously bound to you as Adam and Eve?
Mother's Side
II. THOMAS, 1911 This one from memory. Thomas stands at a pigeon- coop, back to the wire his hand fists cocky stance on the top edge of the cage, late summer edged sun, bicep flexed beneath a worn white shirt, collar open. In summer moment sepia the story surrounding: he marries the girl of his brother who has died children come from eyes like his they come from stories like this III. FAMILY PICNIC, 1928 There was a time she said, where the place you pass gas stations now and people begging with frayed brown signs used to be a park and in the creek were frogs and turtles and we would watch a plane land in a field and we were the only ones who had a car Mother made chicken and she made me dress as if for a party and I met my cousins for the first time someone had a camera and there the women are with their hair down it is summer you can see their knees That is my father, Thomas. He is standing beside our car with his arms apart, mouth open demonstrating how Mother would catch a ball IV. BLIND GRANNY, UNDATED Blind Granny was Sioux, she said her name was Georgeann and I would brush her long hair every day she used a whalebone comb I have it here Look at that hair it was black until the day she died What else do you know about her Nothing Children should be seen and not heard V. NAN, 1936 She stands in the yard in her dress before graduation: the biggest corsage you ever saw, a mum of all things The dress is lace in those days stockings mattered handbags mattered she'd talk for half a day about crocheted sweaters a hat shopping trip fifty years before unlike some others the exposure is brief enough to catch her smile Rosemarie Koch
If you've any comments on this poem, Rosemarie Koch would be pleased to hear from you.
The Koch family - past and present