My Mother’s Autograph Album
The bound leather a skin of dust
and embossed — New York, 1939,
World’s Fair Edition.
Pages bordered in gold leaf.
Untouched for eighty years.
She had saved it on her closet shelf
beneath her feathered caps
with the netted veils,
New Year’s noise makers
and buttoned evening gloves,
high heels, patent and silver.
Behind that door there was everything
she never closed a door on,
leaving me the keeper
of her album, the glossy photos
followed by a list of her “Favorites,”
Oliver Twist, the book,
Mark Twain, the author,
“a stitch in time saves nine,” motto.
And on a sky blue page,
her parents’ autographs
in chicken scratches of Yiddish,
names of classmates,
voted the brightest, most
popular, or wittiest,
then a boy’s clean script:
Dottie’s like a little star,
riding on a trolley car,
when the car gets off the tracks,
Dottie wants her nickel back.
Those are the boys who will enlist
and maybe survive the war,
the girls who will sit
at switchboards, receive rations,
and send packages to the boys.
Each faint inscription and name
seems like a hand waving on Armistice Day
Here! I’m over here! and my mother
throws them a kiss.