Among His Effects We Found a Photograph

My mother is beautiful as a flapper.
She is so in love
that she has been gazing
secretly at my father
for forty years.
He’s in uniform,
with puttees and swagger stick,
a tiny cork mustache
bobbing above a shoreline of teeth.
They are “poor but happy.”
In his hand is a lost book
he had memorized,
with a thousand clear answers
to everything.