The Baggage of Photographs

You are the face in a faded photograph from a past that is not your own. You are an image of your mother, her hand at her breast, touching with butterfly fingers the gossamer fold of her gown. You are the DNA of your friends in their celluloid Peter Pan collars, their dickeys beneath sweaters, their one good string of pearls, pins of cameo. They go retrograde, just as you will. You comfort each other in the hope of heaven, blurring beyond sepia borders of tintypes, a slow curling and browning at their edges, although photographs share a shelf life greater than your own. As delicate as your mother's hand on her silky dress, souls are no doubt weightless-- drift lightly into the presence of angels, principalities, cherubim and seraphim. How is it that there is room for all this lost and found? Did God cry, "Let there be rain," and the rain fell down, each drop a piece of baggage deleted from heaven? When skies become heavy and black, when clouds spill thundering rain, is it the carry-ons, the suitcases of the dead, making room for the living?