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These Faces of Ours
Everyone walks around with faces of lovers of God, everyone, young, old, grumpy, delighted, enraged, empurpled with rage, redd…
Robinson Crusoe dips his foot in the river
checking for piranhas
watches the grasses of the glade
checking for vipers
squats in the tallest tree branches
checking for cougars
barely relaxes at twilight or dawn
cocking his ears at every crack or twitch
in the air around him
squinching his eyes nearly shut
snapping them open at the next sound
his whole being shocked alert at his
very existence in this new world
in this next life after drowning
Shipwreck his mind on the shoals leaving
just enough provisions
having to ferry them to shore and then
inland to his invented habitation
visited by toucans and gibbons
and a crawling earth all around him
ready to pounce
He’s Adam naming his solitude
and he names it Despair then amends it in
time as time goes on
to Endurance then gradually to
Survival then to Watchful Subsistence
then The Emperor of Nothingness
King of All He Surveys
loss upon loss
until nothing is left
(and it’s not even Friday)
and blue sky hangs above him
like a bell ringing for
him alone
bereft now only of
bereftness itself
soul hitting its highest pitch
and dazzling there
2
Crusoe found himself
where he’d never been before
just as we do
going where we go
Surrounded by exotic foliage and
hot turquoise waves lapping
blackened shores under beaten sun and
leavened moonlight
alternating
So it’s no wonder he at first couldn’t
recognize himself when he met himself in
Friday’s form not the living
shadow of himself but his
real self of which Crusoe himself
was just the
bleached holy ghost of the
unity of the two of them
lost together on a
single island
two atrial valves on either side
propelling
in the sea’s tumultuous breast
3
“The revelation of the Face of God
is from within the
events of our lives”
thought Crusoe alone in his
aloneness
neither slave nor king of all he
surveys
but a soul within that “within-ness”
and a soul apart
seeing with the single
eye of his heart
4
The island Crusoe lived on
became the hat he wore
and the shoes he wrapped around his
feet
the arterial streams his arteries
and the ocean the world at large
He’d been on all the peaks and
looked down every sheer cliff
Birds scattered at his noise
and when he held his breath
the air snapped shut
and life took center stage
He was the drama of a
lost soul under the stars
His thoughts were the
unobtainable gazelle that
leapt over the ridge
into the long lush valley below
It’s true he gave up thinking of escape
or dreaming of flight
but as he entered anonymity among the
dull rocks and stones
the winds and stalks
his light one of the fragile candles
another kind of darkness became
his darkness
Loving fingers of it from behind around his
middle that
stretched him out at night
a night he seemed to be
transported through the air in
from ocean to ocean
side to side of his
own islanded sides
and the sides of the world
the full dimension
sprung from form
whose island as he rose
disappeared from
under him
12/24/12 (from Next Life)
Categories: Poems