Here it is.
The second poem we're going to read
will be published shortly in Sonora Review, the magazine,
certainly more than 20 years old,
that has been edited by a succession of MFA graduate
students here in the program.
And the current co-editors in chief
are Melissa Koosmann and Matt Sadler, I believe.
And the issue number 45 was out just a few weeks ago.
46 will be on the heels of it in a week or two.
And this is a poem from issue 46.
Also a prose poem.
It's titled "Visage, After John Berger."
And many of you will know John Berger
as the brilliant essayist, novelist who lives
in the French countryside.
He writes frequently on visual art.
His meditations on artists and their work are art themselves.
They're beautiful, philosophical, rich,
provocative pieces.
This poem is after John Berger, because I stole an idea
from an essay of his that's in a preface to a novel trilogy.
So the first two sentences of this
are really a kind of paraphrase of an idea in this essay,
and then I see what I can do with it
in the rest of the poem.
"Visage, After John Berger."
"In the household, or the place of work, any community whose
numbers are small and stable, the stories that pass daily,
person to person, are like dots of color
on a pointillist canvas.
If you could stand far enough from the whole,
an image you might think of as the face of that community
would compose itself.
If the family's middle son drowned,
or the boss's administrative assistant
was disfigured in a car wreck, people
would talk about it in low serious tones, some weeping,
releasing a flood of grief dots the color of coal.
A few would grow angry at the injustice of such a tragedy,
resulting in dots at the yellow, orange, red end
of the spectrum.
The portrait would darken and shimmer
in places with the terrible news.
Inside the canvas, you can only sense, walking room to room,
exchanging words with other people,
variations in the atmosphere, the subtle shifts
in color of the larger image, the way your skin might
register small changes in temperature, just
as inside your mind, as you look out at the world,
you carry only a vague and incorporeal impression
of your own face, unless standing in front of a mirror.
Even then, the image is somehow unbelievable, so flat,
so lacking in contour.
We can't walk around our own bodies, after all,
as if they were sculptures.
What might it be like to see yourself
as others do, strangers in the gym,
for example, whose job it is, for the hour of the workout,
to become appraisers of bodies.
"You're ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly!"
the identical twin shouts at her lovely sister.
They are 14, radiant and trim, hair a royal auburn
and eyes a coastal green.
How infernally annoying, to have your double there before you,
at all times.
How can you concentrate on anything else?
As you take command of your language, your own way
of making yourself known to the world,
as your sexual efflorescence changes
the sound of your voice, the shape of your body,
the way you imagine others and yourself in the future,
as the very death that awaits you, your awareness that there
is an end, rises up to embrace you in adolescence
or your twenties, with every step that you take,
you face this duplicate, this impostor."