After my mother died in June, I went through lost of family pictures, including some from over a hundred years ago. It made me reflect on the people portrayed in them, thinking of who they were at the time they were photographed. 

It’s a full-length portrait, head to foot.
He wears a dark suit, white shirt, and white bow-tie.
He bends his arms behind his back, hands out of sight,
the pose that’s favored by the awkward. 
She stands beside him, dressed in white from neck
to just above her ankles. She seems to lean
towards him the slightest bit. 

I’m quite sure who they are, though they 
don’t look like the people I remember.
In the days to come, he would grow his waist
and lose his hair; her face would hibernate 
behind thick glasses.

I see them through a grandchild’s eyes
but that is not the people whom they always were.
Unmoored once, 
they got to freely walk around the city, 
imagining the places they might live,
the people they might meet and marry,
and the man or woman each would come to be. 
I would have liked to travel back across 
the vast sea 
of time to meet them then: 
I wonder what our conversation might have been.