The town fathers slump
in their suits, their mouths
limp across their shins,
but my father stands straight
at the center of men and smiles
wide, direct as a handshake.
The caption says he’s completed a deal.

But I know my father
had another smile
thin as string, bent
like the curve of his hat – his felt hat,
his good tweed coat couldn’t cover
the twist in his mouth
I saw when he went out walking alone
at four in the morning –

a smile below sad eyes,
the same look his father had
in the photo on my parents’ bureau.
My father used to say his father
“always wanted to –“  I don’t remember what.
He never did it.
My mother said my father
always wanted to do something too.
In the mirror I recognize
the little tell-yourself-it-doesn’t-matter smile,
our family caption.

The windows in the newspaper photo
are curtainless, frames for bare trees.

- 2004 Boston Herald contest, 3rd prize, selected by New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn

SHELBY ALLEN is a 2004 prizewinner in the Boston Herald poetry contest judged by Alice Quinn.
Shelby teaches poetry in Massachusetts state prisons and is completing an M.A. in Theater Education at Emerson College.  Her poems appear in Phoebe, New MillenniumWritings, English Journal, and elsewhere.