Author’s Note: My poem comes from an ekphrastic workshop hosted by the writer and artist Jay McCoy. As inspiration, he offered up a cull of photographs with fuzzy origins. This one called out to me with its distance and contrast: the angled violence of the composition, the boyish diffidence of the subject’s stance, the heedless chickens. . . . The eerie mood of the image was only heightened when I discovered the year on the back—1943. Because I could not find any records with the youth’s name, I had to—as poets are wont to—dream up the details of the life and family from which he was ripped. I could not help but adumbrate from his isolation in the frame, from the shadows cleaving the world of the scene.
Found familiar photograph
(southern US, 1943)
The season is impossible,
and the screen that clings
to their porch
is consoled solely
by the late creep
of an early sun.
In fact, the family’s dead
tree is extant
only as silhouette:
It looms amid the whole
life of the lawn,
on those frozen hens,
like bivouacs
in a blizzard.
The soon-to-be soldier,
his boy-limbs perform
like hostages,
and his uniform
wears him. It’s clear
his mother, relentless, shoots
with pride his pose
aplomb atop those
unfinished steps—
set there everything
they thought stood firm.
I wonder whether
his father has gone
or is somewhere back
in the garage—
clanking old irons,
conspicuous and waiting
for someone to come
and say something soft.
Vaughn Hayes
Vaughn Hayes is a poet and writer with roots in Kentucky. His words have appeared in Poetry South, The Mid-Atlantic Review, ionosphere, and many others. He was awarded his MFA from Western Kentucky University and now teaches college writing in Philadelphia. The poetic mythologizing of the quotidian—and the contradictions therein—are his obsessions. Otherwise he is loafing with his tabby cat.
