She lined up the boys by height
and steadied her camera.
All were dressed alike, in nothing
but shorts and holey tennies,
nearly bald—their hair summer shorn—
and they fidgeted as she fixed them
in the tiny window, six-boys,
ribby and scabby, their limbs aboriginal brown
under the hot Iowa sun
and thin as cornstalks.
Somewhere in the black camera
it is still 1956, and mothers are hanging
diapers on the clothesline,
a practiced eye on the clouds.
It seems in each life
a moment comes that the heart adheres to,
when light floods in to assemble
a single image in the dark.