Sarah Wetzel
My First Face
For fifty-five years, Borges slowly went blind,
losing first grey and green, the small fonts, the leaf's
network of veins, then the difference between cerulean
and sapphire, between Chianti and claret. In the end,
it was every edition of Shakespeare, love looks not with eyes,
winged Cupid's painted blind. Five years later, everything
black, Borges said, I'd always imagined that paradise
would resemble a library...no one asked what, abandoned
to your labyrinth of darkness, do you imagine now?
A man I married told me, one morning, I don't think I love you.
We'd been married twelve years though it took him
another two years to walk out the door. To be honest,
I never loved him, not even as I said yes. Yet I know,
I'd still be with him if he hadn't left. Borges knew
from a young age he would, like his father and his father's
father before him, become sightless. It's why he read
every book, he said, before he was fifty. Why he refused
to learn Braille and how he could tell just by listening
how many books a bookstore held. How, even blind,
he could draw his own face—a scrawl without a mouth
or eyes, a ball of black string tossed on a white sheet
of paper. The truth is not always what’s written down—
I loved that man and, if only a little, I love him still.
My Father Draws My Face
Before leaving St. Peter's Square, I send my father
a postcard; on the front, a smiling Pope stands
beside Bernini's fountain; on back, a Vatican stamp.
As I write out his address, I know my father
is just waking up. He'll look at the clock, which is six
hours behind mine to wonder if today
I'll phone him. He'll drink a cup of coffee or two
and, very soon after, he'll continue the portrait of me
that he started almost three years ago. As a model
he uses a photo from my wedding day
though that man and I are long parted.
In the portrait, there is the Dalmation from my girlhood
and Rodin's Thinker and Michelangelo's David,
which in his idea of me exist in the same place.
There is love and rain in the portrait. A palm tree.
There is the trip to Prague we took together.
There is the one to Paris we didn't.
This is the same portrait that every child hopes
her father is drawing of her. Blue skies and grass.
The bankruptcy and missed birthdays. Even those.
And like most fathers, mine has little talent
for faces and he always gets the mouth wrong.
Daughter Like Father
My father stands alone in front of the ocean
under a flattened sky, gazing
out over the gray expanse of water.
It's dawn and it seems from the window
where I watch him that there could be
no portrait more sad and lonely.
Seagulls wheel above the pier
where three fishermen cast their rods.
They are not the only signs of life—
the wind blows, whitecaps churn up
and resettle, a sailboat is drawn on and then
removed, sun-punctured clouds slide
across a slowly brightening sky.
My father could be the same monk
staring out into the German sea painted
by Caspar Friedrich two centuries ago.
The same wind reaches my window
blows the curtain's transparent fabric across
my hand, small birds embroidered on its border
dart through my room. The tiny figure
of my father stands in front of the vast Atlantic
for almost forty minutes. When he finally turns,
he stumbles in the sand, falling
to his knees. I watch
as he slowly picks himself up, knowing
we will never speak of it.
“I have been teaching and living in Rome, Italy off and on for the past four years. While a Writer in Residence at The American Academy of Rome in 2012, I started reading the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini. For Duende readers unfamiliar with Pasolini, he was a poet, novelist, filmmaker, and an outspoken commentator and critic. He was and remains one of Italy’s most influential and controversial artists. On November 2, 1975, at the age of 53, Pasolini was brutally murdered outside Rome. His work, often written in the street language of Rome, as well as the passionate way he lived his life became obsessions. These two poems, as well as many in manuscript I'm completing, are written in response to some of that obsession.”
