How does a memory lurk for generations, a landscape
sun-burnished as a whale’s skull, as the Inca Tern’s
 
yellow cheeks? I have a photo of men and boys lined up
near their tiny collection of beach homes out of frame.
 
In the photo my father squats, his elbows on thick
legs, his eyes dark in a frowning, beautiful face. His father,
 
Pablo, stands in the second row, his suit pulled high
over his panzón, jaw jutting like a ship’s prow, a mustache
 
like a wonderful dark brush. His crisp hair appears
as if tousled by the wind. Over the ocean looms
 
a stone-pocked dune as empty as the savage sky. I write
about a photograph, not a memory, and yet I remember
 
the man with the head of a wolf high on the dark, rocky
dune when I woke early one morning in that cottage
 
torn down before I was born. The wolf-headed man
wore a cape of gray feathers that moved in the wind,
 
about which I still dream.