The old landscape painting near our bed
reveals hidden images
as we lie awake most evenings, talking.
Sideways shadows show
a frail woman wearing a bonnet,
child’s face tipped up,
old-fashioned baby carriage,
but mostly animals—sleeping bear,
grinning raccoon, and what looks
like a cartwheeling squirrel.
The images keep shifting,
so we can’t find the bottle
with an elaborate stopper
we saw last week, but there,
can you see it, a whale with
a pensive expression, and over there,
in the corner, an elfin creature
peeking from behind that branch?
Until you, I saw pictures no one else did.
One day the speckled Formica table
of my childhood kitchen might reveal
a man carrying an urn on his shoulder,
arm raised to steady it. The next day
I couldn’t find the man or urn
but saw a camel, arched doorway,
downturned face, twisted tree.
Growing up, I saw my wished-for
pet in a bedsheet’s clumped folds,
the nativity in a just-flipped pancake,
equations yet to be solved in a cracked plate,
a mountain goat in our windshield’s frost
just before the wipers scraped him
with a whoosh right off the edge.
I am grateful you and I both see
such pictures, never mind there are so few
photographs of us after all these years.
