Self-Facing Ghazal
for Frank Auerbach (Self Portrait 2023)
Ochre, vermillion, and deep blue gashes
cohere in one of the truest records of a face
you knew best from dwelling in it, your gaze
focused for endless months on another’s face,
a routine you kept for decades with your sitters,
brush in hand, drawn to relentlessly face
your subject and the canvas or paper, most often
scraping off or rubbing out your work to efface
the effort which failed to reveal the lump or nub
of what you sought, intangible, not just a face
but the bloody business of existence peeled
back, the still warm heart of a deer unlaced.
Early in the pandemic, robbed of your subjects,
compelled to reconsider your very own face:
that banal object once avoided, in old age grown
pouched and scored, the topography of life traced
its existence in patterns only you could discern
and translate into aspects strange as the surface
of some cryptic yet familiar moon. Circling round
you Frank, I can almost hold the doubtful hours we face.
* * * * *
The Body is Nothing but Stories
You reach a point where the body
is nothing but stories
like a once pristine cast
graffitied in smudged red and blue ink
and the desperate sweat of confinement.
It began as perfectly as it could,
was a bell that could be rung,
but never unrung,
the layered waves of sound
leaving ridges and creases
in their wake that no amount of living
could smooth away.
The body’s apparently random braille
of scar tissue a permanent index
of what’s been lost
and when
and how.
But also of what might endure
for just a little longer.
That is always the hope —
the same hope as Leontodon taraxacum,
which will thrust its way
toward the light
through any crack in the pavement.
Search the internet for common weeds
that beset sidewalks and you’ll be met
with a litany of ways
to kill dandelions
and their hardy companions.
Search for “life”
and you’ll be unable to avoid
offers to insure it,
the human need for control
baked into search results at every turn
just as our lived experience
is pricked, callused, and ghosted
in patterns we can’t seem to shed.