I’m walking beside them in Pompeii.
We’re tourists of course.  I’m thirteen,
freshly disappointed, big lips, blue
blazer, man’s trench coat, pair of
beginner balls dangling.
Every so often, kneeling to touch
the ground, I pick something up –
keys, coins, a ticket to the locker
where my mother keeps her superstitions.
What’re these? I say, laughing, stuffing
things in my pockets. Think of them as melodies
or instructions for later, my dad says.
I look up. Are you what I’m going to be
like in forty years? And why did the children
get covered in lava before
they had a chance to fully form?

So I figure taking pictures is the best way
to play it, capturing all without yielding.
Using bar mitzvah money, I buy
a Nikkormatt duty-free at the airport,
an inspired act, my dad says, looking
at the price. My plan is to dismiss them
entirely, make fun of their stupid hopes,
their bickering and their loving glances
and pay attention only to what interests me.
The rest, saved on film, I’ll bring back
and evaluate with my friends, stoned,
listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash.
Surely we’ll know what’s important
to carry around for the rest of our lives.

Now that they’re gone, I pull the pictures
and see something completely different.
Instead of my pretty mother posing in front
of the Eifel Tower, I see her crumbled face
when the pantomime was over, looking
straight into the camera and giving up.
The man with the tightest grip, the human
currency converter, the one who read
every guidebook at Brad Allen, dry heaving,
asks me what his best play is now.
But the hardest thing to get my arms around
is the skeptical little boy behind the lens
and how (not so much in little ways)
he became them and they became me.