All night, my mother seeks that wedding photo.
Remember, she says, your granny
wearing a gigantic hat—with feathers!
Gibson girl hat, and Grandpa had a moustache?
We loved when he grew a moustache.
Never shave it off, we would beg.

I say, I don’t remember that picture
She says, yes, yes,
it sat on the Italian desk
until you broke the frame.

But Granny never had a wedding photo.

Last week Mom rooted for letters from her French aunts
tracing forebears back to Joséphine de Beauharnais.
Who stole them from the Bible on the Italian desk?

Insomniac, she drives the nurse distracted,
then assaults my sister: J’accuse!

Jane stole the wedding picture too. The nonexistent one.

And she cannot forgive the taking of the guns.
My own family steals from me,
longing for my father’s Beretta.

Today she signs off our call
“Kiss the baby for me.”

Jack is thirty, and I have no grandchild.

In half-sleep, she recreates a world,
and waking, ransacks reality for things that never were.

When true sleep finally comes, perhaps she’ll find
lost photos,
royal ancestors,
my Napoleonic father posing for an equestrian statue,
my son’s neverborn child,
and the gun will be loaded.