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At Forty |
A canyon between my eyes,
a valley, deepened and lengthened,
from back when I was seven
chicken-pocked, polka-dotted.
Sores covered my body,
on eyelids, inside my nose,
between my toes,
down my throat and
in my ears.
Breathless, blind and mute,
I slept for days
amid hallucinations
and fevered sweat.
One morning I stood like St. Sebastian
before my mother's camera
draped in a sheet, pixeled with blood
because we were in a place where pity
made us laugh the laughter
that always come last,
straight from the belly, absurdly
and hot with tears.
Then I healed, and a small pockmark
like a dry lake stayed between my brow,
and in my thirties it grew.
Deforming, informed with worry,
and the never spoken sorry,
the anticipation that fell
into the gulf of wakeful nights
and the squint from sunlit days,
until it became like a trench
where two brows converge:
the subduction of love and loss.
Now, in the mirror, pulling the skin
on my forehead tight and then releasing
the crease to its permanent fold,
I try to imagine out of humor,
or pity, that the pock is now a canyon,
that I should stand at the edge of
with binoculars
and take in with hot tears
like a tourist
before a world, cracked,
and full of wonder.
copyright 2015
Emily
Fernandez |
