Sorting, In Evening Light

I attach a place and season to the magazine photo of a man with gray, stubbled face, saved with clippings of others: old milk cans and barns in contrast with the space-age classic of earth that day man stepped on the moon and looked back.

For a time I leave off lamps, let dusk settle over the whiskered face like a faint texture of suede in old family albums. His hat has been battered by sun and rainy weather. Great-grandfather had the same skin— once browned, later soft, almost transparent. He often hummed when I was in the room, almost never spoke.

I’ve made assumptions about the man in the photo. He was always poor, but has no debt. He’s not traveled many miles from home . . . has no home any longer. If he notices this, his eyes don’t tell. They are amber and like a dance caught on film as they look out over harvested fields bright as the moon.

No such scenery is in the photograph . . . only the hat, the face with faint beard, and at a lower corner the long-fingered hands where they rest on a plain wood cane and do not tremble.