Boy w/Fish

The photograph I’ve found could have been one we framed, one we came back to again and again as you grew older, one you even liked perhaps, smiled at in spite of yourself when Dad said where’s that picture...and then went rummaging around to find it.

It’s you on the old pier, barefoot, in cargo shorts and that baseball cap of Dad’s you always wore. Behind you, the west branch of the Westport River is churning, the current coursing its way towards the ocean in this black and white picture your father took that day, a day in late July, summer about to turn into fall.

That summer. That house. That day. That divorce.

The shoreline, the distant tree line, a heart-breakingly beautiful blue sky, but here white washed and splintered like the dock you’re standing on..

You’re looking straight into the camera, straight into your father’s eyes. It’s just you, one foot slightly back for balance, the other in front as if you’re about to move closer to him, reach through the lens of his Nikon, the one he always wears around his neck; the thing that keeps him at arms-length from the world, from us.

I can’t look at your face. It’s too painful, too visceral, even after all these years. You’re smiling, just like he’s told you to – SMILE – and so you do, wide, hopeful, proud of the fish you’ve just caught, of the fishing pole standing at attention by your side that’s taller than you, and the fishing line you’re holding up with its tiny fish, too small to keep but which you won’t throw back because you think if you keep it he will stay. 

There’s an old iron cleat behind you riveted to the crooked pilings. He’s framed it perfectly, all squares and angles, because composition is everything for someone who does this for a living, someone who will memorialize that day in this way, the day he came to visit us as if nothing had ruptured, as if in this black and white photograph he could rearrange it all, pretend that your little, innocent, pleading, face was a happy one.

Just a boy gone fishing with his father on a perfect summer day

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