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

Setsuko Hara

142 A Face to Meet the Faces Setsuko Hara Cynthia Arrieu-King A bristling fir whispered about my vanishing. The great silence. How, fade to black, I, the girl of your dreams, am also this tan middle-aged man I swept into suits and hanged. No marriage, your Eternal Virgin in black and white. Black and white flips a skirt, a frown until I, so famous, fly like a buck into woods no one can see. They knock. I don’t live here, I say. I keep the cedar door to. * Here in the house, a moth bats a lantern, holding to a flame-opulent scrim. Slatted sandals. This clatter of plums— I’m a chime films end with after twenty years of poses, striding into the fake hall as you wanted tilting my head to a crinoline kimono. Catapulted to billboards glutting the seashore, I lived this thought: No one’s going to burn my bones until smoke stops its creep from the kettle. 143 Fifteen Easy Minutes No smoked femur of mine will mix in water; a wash to paint a portrait of sad ether a black to give the impression of bottomless eyesá filled with whatever you wanted. The blunt kite of appearing, and now I shade the hanging wash, my hand a visor, my hand breaks up old ash. The sun an unexpected hand. I say, behind the door, She doesn’t live here. * It’s been years since I tired, tiptoeing for light meters. The fecund night of other people’s feelings and now I hide, a black LP played in perpetuity. I brush the air unseen. Is life disappointing? Yes. * Kurosawa. Ozu. Narusa. Inagaki. Go on, claim with all names, grab noise at sea, and unplanned seafoam chilling my calves for the twenty-third time. You can’t film this yourself. Out there 144 A Face to Meet the Faces withers a million me’s in celluloid. I accepted your fifty-cent tickets— that hardly assuaged my brother struck by a train before my eyes, hardly your tripod my face gone among chrysanthemums and today, a long still of myself: Radishes in rain. Oyster-dumb, not hoping for grit or a pearl. * I feel your undying admiration, tiny boxes of white cream on spoons. Snow lands on everything you knew of me Snow beyond a dry indigo curtain this backwards, unseen breath. Into a kettle’s voice I disappear, a smile useless without a fence. My heart thuds an all-interior vista almost big as what you loved so much, the idea of this steady sea—these happy eyes. ...