D.

Paper provides a father, or, more accurately, a man standing in the road, almost turned away. What else could he be? A man of charity, donating red hair, green eyes, a stubborn will, a sorry stomach, and a second toe longer than the first.

Honor and valor and maps and sea journals. My mother kept a box over the doorway, next to the wreath and ornaments, labeled D. (an initial I mistook for decorations until one Thanksgiving I opened it to find the flag, folded ceremoniously). Now it could be for Dylan, as I read on your papers, or Dad, as I never got to call you, or Dead, as you have always been to me.

In history I learn all about you, the millions of you, try to find your face in the mud or the sticks. I pore over your pages from the island's jungles, read about the natives and the malaria. What was it really like when the elephants marched through your camp? Were the tusks threatening or did they gleam in the sun, like the bait you and your father used for flounder in the sound?

Did you know that the clearing you came to, described so meticulously ("A white palace glints miles ahead, but it could be footsteps for all I know. The sun keeps shooting through the branches, I miss Lydia we smell like shit we eat bugs ") would be the place a bullet would rip through your stomach, would be the place you'd lie down?

I learn that photography is the process of recording pictures by means of capturing light, chemical information that develops as lines into an image we recognize. It is the art in science, in sentiment, in strangers connected by chemistry.