The voice was accented by her first language,
German as spoken in Austria (she was from Graz).

She did not hand me the parsley, she gave me scissors
and sent me outdoors. This happened all the years

I went there – either I would cut mint from the garden
or parsley, or chives. She made salad in a huge tin bowl,

red on the outside and white on the inside
with a black rim, or if there were only a few of us

she used a smaller bowl of transparent Plexiglas.
Cutting parsley meant stumbling into the night,

out sliding doors into the dusk or the dark.
I was always nervous I couldn't cut the right

amount of parsley or mint. I came in through
the kitchen. When I arrived, she would turn from

the stove or sink, say my name in her accent, embrace me,
and pulling back to look at me, say "Beauté!"

Even though I had studied French, it took years
to understand she was saying "beauty," though

I knew somehow when she said that word, she was
making new life for me. When she said Beauté.

those syllables were light and I was in that light.
I use the word stumbled because I was so

self-conscious. If I cut the parsley as she wanted
then, I reasoned, she would smile again, exclaim

that word I didn't understand and send me
to the room where guests were or just her husband

watching the news, turning it off when he saw me,
offering his cheek for a kiss. She spoke seven languages –

German, also French, Romanian (in Bucharest,
nineteen when she fled Berlin to study there),

English (the first husband, British, married to become
"Madame" to live "as I pleased" which she did after

the immediate divorce), Spanish (fifty years of
photographing – flamenco, matador, a village

that gave a street her name). When her daughter was a child,
she studied Russian to read the poems. In her fifties

she learned Chinese. Near eighty, photographing
Styria, in Slovenia, the place her mother's

family had always lived – How are the pictures?
She collapsed on that trip. From pain. Yet continued

photographing. Because it was important. The proofs
on her sickbed. Reaching for the pill bottle —

Darling, will you hand me those? Lifting one leg
to divert pain. How are the pictures? Very

interesting, she said, though forthrightly
modest. And we talked about what pain allows.

When I met her I was thirty-nine,
though now I'm no younger than she was

the day she came to take the first portrait.