Poems, 1957–1967

FACES SEEN ONCE

FACES SEEN ONCE Faces seen once are seen To fade from around one feature, Leaving a chin, a scar, an expression Forever in the air beneath a streetlight, Glancing in boredom from the window Of a bus in a country town, Showing teeth for a moment only, All of which die out of mind, except One silver one. Who had the dog-bitten ear? The granulated lids? The birthmark? Faces seen once change always Into and out of each other: An eye you saw in Toulon Is gazing at you down a tin drainpipe You played with as a dull child In Robertstown, Georgia. There it is April; the one eye Concentrates, the rusty pipe Is trembling; behind the eye Is a pine tree blurring with tears: You and someone's blue eye Transforming your boyhood are weeping For an only son drowned in warm water With the French fleet off Senegal. Soon after, the cancer-clamped face Of your great-grandfather relaxes, Smiles again with the lips of a newsboy. Faces seen once make up Buckdancer's Choice 191 One face being organized And changed and known less all the time, Unsexed, amorphous, growing in necessity As you deepen in age. The brow wrinkles, a blind, all-knowing Questioning look comes over it, And every face in the street begins To partake of the look in the eyes, Every nose is part of that nose And changes the nose; every innocence and every Unspoken-of guilt goes into it, Into the face of the one Encountered, unknowable person who waits For you all over the world In coffee shops, filling stations, bars, In mills and orphan asylums, In hospitals, prisons, at parties, Yearning to be one thing. At your death, they—it is there, And the features congeal, Having taken the last visage in, Over you, pretesting its smile, The skin the indwelling no Color of all colors mingled, The eyes asking all there is. Composed, your own face trembles near Joining that other, knowing That finally something must break Or speak. A silver tooth gleams; You mumble, whispering "You 192 Are human, are what I have witnessed. You are all faces seen once/7 Through the bent, staring, unstable dark Of a drainpipe, Unity hears you— A God-roar of hearing—say only "You are an angel's too-realized Unbearable memoryless face/' Buckdancer's Choice 193 ...