Your flight delayed, you scroll your photos app.
There is the dog you just adopted, eyes alert
and energetic. There is your son roughhousing
with him on the carpet, wild with joy. There is
the dog you just put down, eyes old and cancer-
ridden, your son gently petting him. There you
are, suddenly forty, hair thinning, cheeks fuller.
There is your son on the first day of kindergarten,
pre-k, daycare. There is your nanny, wearing a mask
because it’s peak-pandemic, pre-vaccine. There
is your newborn, a crumb on the couch, your dog
gently snuggling with him; there are your parents,
beaming with pride, less gray, less wrinkled.
There is your wife in labor. There she is on the
Via Roma, six-months pregnant. There she is
defending her dissertation. There is the house
you lived in, and the one before that, the trees
you planted still young and vulnerable.
There you are after a 100-mile bike race, fit
and tanned, your wife after a marathon, radiant
and exhausted. There you are, opening gifts on
your 30th birthday, your 20th. There is your graduation,
your cross-country bike trip, the year you lived in Spain,
rail-thin and full of acne, wanting to be both Gandhi
and Lorca—an ascetic poet. And there is your grandma
after her stroke, you unsure of what to say or how to say it.
Your flight is called just as you reach the last pictures
taken on that first iPhone, grainy and foreign.
You think of those dusty albums at your parents’ house,
the ones that go back to your birth, and their birth,
and their parent’s birth. You think of Polaroids,
Daguerreotypes, oil portraits, cave paintings,
the Age of Dinosaurs, Pangaea, the Cambrian explosion,
the formation of stars, the Big Bang itself. You blink
and you are in hospice, your grandchildren hug your
withered frame but you are not sad—in your final photo
on this Earth, no one has to remind you to smile.
