----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- face today Diane read me her poem in my car with dusty mother mary looking on. it is the first i've heard of her and i think she is wonderful. everyone ought to go out and find her book of poetry. this one is for all of us who are learning to live with our faces real and imagined. but it is especially for my friend alina. I Have Had To Learn To Live With My Face You see me alone tonight. My face has betrayed me again, the garage mechanic who promises to fix my car My face that my friends tell me is so full of character; my face I have hated for so many years; my face I have made an angry contract to live with my face that I wish you could bruise and batter and destroy, napalm it, throw acid in it, so that I might have another or be rid of it at last. I drag peacock feathers behind me to erase the trail of the moon. those tears I shed for myself, sometimes in anger. There is no pretense in my life. The man who lives with me like a dark snark coming out of my mouth, or love the tapestry of my actions, my life/this body, this but angry insistence, their presence. I hate them, want my life to be more. I sell my soul for good plumbing I tell everyone; and my face is soft, opal, a feathering of snow against the cold black leath coat which is night. You night, my face against the chilly expanse of your back. Learning to live with that you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life. And I have not learn happily to live with my face, that Diane which always looks better on film than in life. I sternly accept this plain face, and hate every moment of that sternness. I want to laugh at this ridiculous face of lemon rings and vinegar cruets of unpaved raods and dusty file cabinets of the loneliness of wall Street at night and the desert of school on a holiday but I would have to laugh alone in a cold room Prefer the anger that at least for a moment gives me a proud profile Always, I've envied the rich the beautiful the talented the go-getters of the world. I've watched myself remain alone isolated a fish that swam through the net because I was too small but remained alone in deep water because the others were caught taken away. It is so painful for me to think now, to talk about this; I want to go to sleep and never wake up. The only warmth I ever feel is wool covers on a bed. But self-pity could trail us all, drag us around on the bottom of shoes like squashed snails so that we might never fight/ and it's anger I want now, fury, to direct at my face and its author, to contemptuously, sternly, brutally even, make it live with itself, look at itself every day, that realist is learning to live with what you're born with, noble to have been anything but defeated, that pride and anger and silence will hold us above beauty, though we bend down often with so much anguish for a little beauty, a word, like the blue night, the night of rings covering the floor and glinting into the fire, the water, the wet earth, the age of songs, guitars, angry busloads of etched tile faces, old gnarled tree trunks, anything with the beatuy of wood, teak, lemon, cherr I lost my children because I had no money, no husband, I lost my husband because I was no beautiful, I lost everything a women needs, wants, almost before I became a woman, my face shimmering and flas at the moon I look at pictures of myself as a child. I looked lumpy, unformed, like a piece of dough, and it has been my task as a human being to carve out out a mind, carve out a face, carve out a shape with arms & legs, to put a voice inside, and to make a person from a presence. And I don't think I'm unique. I think a thousand of you, at least, can look at those old photos, reflect on your life I have made my face as articulate as I can, and it turns out to be a peculiar face with too much bone in the bridge of the nose, small eyes, pale lashes, thin lips, wide cheeks, a rocky chin, But it's almost beautiful compared to the sodden mass of dough I started out with. I wonder how we learn to live with our faces They must hide so much pain, so many deep trenches of blood, so much that would terrorize and drive others away, if they could see it. The struggle to control it articulates the face. And what about those people With elegant noses and rich lips What do they spend their lives struggling for Am I wrong I constantly ask myself to value the struggle Or only to accept a beautiful face?if it has been toiled for Tonight I move alone in my face; want to forgive all the men whom I've loved?who've betrayed me. After all, the great betrayer is that one I carry about reach day, which I sleep with at night. My own face, angry building I've fought to restore imbued with arrogance and pride, anger and corn. To love this face would be to love a desert mountain, a killer, rocky, water hard to find, no trees anywhere/ perhaps I do not expect anyone to be strange enough to love it; but you.
5:47 p.m. - 2006-05-04 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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