A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry

Pinocchio’s Elegy for the Unreal

238 A Face to Meet the Faces Pinocchio’s Elegy for the Unreal Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis Here’s the rub: you’re on your own. What breaks isn’t replaceable anymore. Gepetto’s hand on your unhinged knee won’t set it right again. A torn finger can’t be carved anew. You prayed for this: Real Boy, then, at last, a skin of your own to hide within. Real boy arms are limp arms against a sea of troubles. Now the stuff you’re carved from rots, touches all it can then forgets the touch. Not to mention pain broken skin and bones the heavy human heart and the way you get the part where Hamlet says: and by a sleep we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. This is for you, Geppetto, deep in the sleep of death. 239 After Happily Ever After Listen up, Old Man (who once pulled my strings, knit the motion to my dance, tied to me somewhere inside even now, only I can’t see the cables, can only feel their tug, like loss’s magnetic field between memory and gut), I miss the certainty of my ligneous hands. Everything’s either too far away or not enough. I can still hear the toys talk, still hear the whispers of the inanimate world, the soul of objects. I wish you’d told me about the way it feels to be watching life from a dying body. Your workshop’s veiled with cobwebs, every old tool dreams of your hands, your smoothing grip. In the corner, a spider unlaces a luna moth, a dinner too huge, too gossamer to be real. ...