squinting at an old slide,
I glimpse my garden leaching white,
copper sedum
suddenly gone silver,
dead hydrangeas levitating
with December mist.
Off the Isis, fog twists in;
when I turn the photo
for more light, I see
Peter on the path, hesitant
beneath the green dint
of Cameroon’s sun.
He’s taken me to see Pa, a man
so old he’s buried ten children—worse luck,
all three wives have also died—
a man barefoot and
wrapped in rags,
slight, and slow to emerge
from his kitchen
steeped in soot from eighty years
of drying corn,
a family’s close talk over the fire.
Peter says, “Oh, he’s a witch,
he has four eyes,” the off-hand glance
that sees you dead.
In the slide, I find the bamboo screen
built by Pa to shield his door.
He talked to us outside
about long-gone rites
for disinterring the dead.
A granddaughter stirred fufu in a second house,
her toddler peed beside the door;
neither looked at me or Peter.
“No good will come,” Pa said,
“from people staring at you and yours.”
