When I took them to the window
each one was faded, as if she had
worn them down in looking
until the life fetched out there
was as thin as the wings of dead moths.
I saw a figure on a ship's deck,
a pony at the edge of a stream
and then two people on a verandah,
smiling uncertainly, their clasped hands
already turned clear on the film,
dust-scratches blazing like fireflies.

Perhaps death came as a grey cast
on a child's face or the last tone
lost from a landscape, but she had seen it;
an occasion changed,
one frame had become too clear,
she had reached for them all in the end
and left her life laid out in that room
like a broken kaleidoscope.