The grandfather I have never met is there, in torpid black and white, the only way I have known him, framed, under glass, with the density of vanished memories.  He tells me about his daughter, my mother, how she danced as a child; her black Russian hair flowed over her shoulders the way dark clouds flow over the Elburz Mountains toward the Caspian Sea where she swam in summer and giggled at Persian boys, unaware of the life that awaited her in America.  Grandfather is without the stroke that reshaped his face, the brain tumor that nearly made him beat father to death with a Louisville Slugger, and he is happy, freshly shaved, sipping wine.

    Grandmother is there, too, her cheeks embroidered with history, each smooth contour a timeline that starts at her eyes and fades into the distance of my dreams.  My father's father is tall, lanky in a wool suit, gothic posed, his dainty wife on his arm.  She reaches the height of his shoulder as she holds a bouquet of flowers and explains to me why my father's first wife is there, seated next to my first half-sister whom I can't recall.  My lips stammer a few vowels and fool her into thinking I know her name.

    There is my uncle, sad that the strings on his violin sag, one broken, and the resin on his bow, dull: calluses on his fingertips mourn the death of the world.

    My sister, with her hair red as lava and her seraph face, is proud at how we have gathered our broken parts, pieced together, each edge the rim of a continent.

    Then there is my father, his sodden face aged and weathered, looking down the drain of his life, watching the past churn with the lilt of an exhausted tornado.  He is ashamed of what he has and has not done.  He regrets and does not lament his regret.  He discards the belt that kissed my skin for more than a decade.  He holds my mother's thick fingers in his hands, studies the lines that lead from her knuckles to her heart, and tries to find where on that map his son waits for him.