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

House of Galicia

264 A Face to Meet the Faces House of Galicia Jonathan B. Rice As in the past the future is maturing So the past is rotting in the future... —Anna Akhmatova I don’t mind the talk of younger men who lead their women out beside the shore at night, and bring them to the coming point, a shudder for a bastard child. They speak to me in pity-looks, saying as they pass—I sit near the blind saint’s park—Wretched husk, watching father, palsied to that oak-slat bench, you’re untouchable, a widower refusing death. I miss caresses of all kinds. And dream the body bared from calf and thigh to wetted gash of sex, abdomen and navel, birth-home and above, the cooling flesh of mid-moan breath and echo of that rising heat. Tonight I mourn the girl who, rising from the imprint of her lying down in sand, chills beneath the young man’s shadow, moon or no, when he buckles back his denim slacks to take her home and leave her there. I watched her unsupported shadow weaving 265 From the Page to the Pen towards me through the slipping dunes and down-coast breeze, which mourns her too, though, knowing more than me of breath and time, will lament, I want to say, for latitudes of days, and leave the outline of her form whisper-thin and falling, shape of arm of wind and shape of breast of wind and shapeless voice scattering across the flat meridian. * Once there was a girl for me. In awe of her I kneaded all myself across her taking form and stayed each time to rest. That was no wasted prowess. No slacking loss. Those drifting hours in and out of sleep we named each child we could not have, and I imagined them, the spirits that they were, wise and cold, refusing us and passing on toward other cries of coupling. And years of this, it closes fast, a fist across my thoughts: What were we then? I never asked. In the silence of our little rooms, in the barking of our arguments and stirring pots and searing pans, the kettles screaming for their instants and then lifted, I am lifted, bodiless, 266 A Face to Meet the Faces to hover in my past, a watching presence. That haunt I always felt I fear I have become. * Rachel of lifted skirt, of leaning down to wake me— for years of standing at a lathe—Rachel wringing blouse and linen, nylons like shed snake skins and every working shirt I wore, ringed with sweat and stinking before their drowning and their wringing, your name and voice are ringing in my thoughts so often now I ask, Can you be gone? and see the little yard I left you in, two Septembers’ worth of indifferent weather ago. And see myself in the bath-steamed mirror, lifting brush and razor, your untranslatable songs lapping every year, your blue blue blue Ukrainian eyes dimming to the weighted grays of cloud fields steeping snow, of stone, wet slate, granite. You are gone. And I am thinned to breaking if I fall, a seated statue, still a little warm, noting the going out and the returning, the usury of a youthful woman I do not know. I watch you walk inside instead of her and want to follow, want for any slap or curse or swear of love within our old, 267 From the Page to the Pen animal embrace. Some night, when no couple struggles in the sand because a pitiless gale mangles every dune, let me rise from the nodding stupor of my body to remember the word or thing you said would be your signal, what you’d murmur or shout or make stir after you’d gone. The photograph of your mother with her thinned family fell from the wall, bursting frame and pitted glass across the floor. That was it, and no, a woman shouting to her son in the street beneath our bedroom window, Bohdan, your father’s name, the boy’s as well. We did not know then. The woman or the name. Neither. The kitchen filled with whispers in late August waking me from sleep which comes in crushing bursts. I fold my arms. I bow my head. No prayer verse nor dream will follow. Once I thought this noise...