Photographs

When a spring snowstorm turned the world white
on the day of a wedding, the light from the windows
illumined a guest with flamingo-pink hair. A wavelength
of color, a beautiful hue, that emerged in the photos
as garish hot pink, seducing the eye of the viewer
away from the bride. In some pictures of me with my children,
I paper-punched my face out, each perforation the ghost
of an unlovely likeness, leaving a scatter of Os in the album,
a series of moms with no vowel. On my first wedding day,
a freak snowstorm with thunder and lightning: weird
weather, we joked, that must be a sign from the gods.
Perception is fickle. In my forties and fifties I harangued myself
as not slim enough and already grown old, whereas what I see now
in photos of me are dark brows on the wing above eyes
the rich brown of a newly turned field, and lips, then despised
as too thin, fulsome with laughter and speech. The yellow O
of the sun in drawings of children belies its true color, white,
as revealed in the prismatic light of the rainbow. A mirrored
          reflection,
however pleasing, is of the moment, while photos make permanent
every unflattering angle and grimace. No color at all at my wedding,
only a black-and-white snapshot of us as we stood,
he trim in his Air Force blues, I in my too-tight dark dress,
on the sidewalk in front of that midwestern courthouse,
before the storm.