Match Cut

My favorite snapshots
of my parents         
are a pair where
they look nothing like themselves.

Dressed in jodhpurs
my mother brandishes a six shooter
          pointed away from the camera
my father was shooting.

She rests a loftily booted foot
     on the glistening rear bumper
          of a coupe,
gazing coolly into the camera lens.

Paired with this photograph
      is one of my father in place of my mother
            sighting the same rifle outside the frame
I learned to shoot with as a boy.

Pasted side by side in the family album
     this would be a match cut in film,
          where two shots are matched
by subject or action.

Together the photos riff urban outlaws,
     the reality, my parents on their honeymoon,
          a back-road trip restricted by wartime gas rationing
in Washington State wheat country. 

And my father grinning, sixty years later,
     as he pointed out to me the revolver’s missing cylinder,
          the only way to get my mother
to overcome her terror of guns long enough to hold the pistol

and take her photograph.