A salad! (Iceberg lettuce)
How to Read a poem
"A Premier of the Daily Round"
HBM ye all
Fog
Affirmation
Making things clean
A Shirt
Quiet night
An Epitaph
John Keats
Leaf
Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House
Mountain and I
Wind & Tree
Fallen tree
Directions
Mud chuckles
Dear Reader
Ars Poetica
My shoes
Rain
Celebration
Winter Scene *
Misty morning
Sayadri
Willows are willows everywhere
Day of Mist
The Night Migrations
Goat at the Sandburg Home
Carl Sandburg's Home
Keywords
Authorizations, license
-
Visible by: Everyone -
All rights reserved
-
301 visits
- Keyboard shortcuts:
Jump to top
RSS feed- Latest comments - Subscribe to the comment feeds of this photo
- ipernity © 2007-2024
- Help & Contact
|
Club news
|
About ipernity
|
History |
ipernity Club & Prices |
Guide of good conduct
Donate | Group guidelines | Privacy policy | Terms of use | Statutes | In memoria -
Facebook
Twitter
I am not shaving, I’m writing about it.
And I conjure the most elaborate idea—
how my beard is a creation of silent labor
like ocean steam rising to form clouds,
or the bloom of spiderwebs each morning;
the discrete mystery of how whiskers grow,
like the drink roses take from the vase,
or the fall of fresh rain, becoming
a river, and then rain again, so silently.
I think of all these slow and silent forces
and how quietly my father’s life passed us by.
I think of those mornings, when I am shaving,
and remember him in a masquerade of foam, then,
as if it was his beard I took the blade to,
the memory of him in tiny snips of black whiskers
swirling in the drain—dead pieces of the self
from the face that never taught me how to shave.
His legacy of whiskers that grow like black seeds
sown over my cheek and chin, my own flesh.
I am not shaving, but I will tell you about the mornings
with a full beard and the blade in my hand,
when my eyes don’t recognize themselves
in a mirror echoed with a hundred faces
I have washed and shaved—it is in that split second,
when perhaps the roses drink and the clouds form,
when perhaps the spider spins and rain transforms,
that I most understand the invisibility of life
and the intensity of vanishing, like steam
at the slick edges of the mirror, without a trace.
Sign-in to write a comment.