So I and several other friends from town, Ander--
I'm not sure who else were invited by Nicole Walker
to participate in a project where
we responded to paintings by artists
and they were posted as conversations in Huffington
Post and I got to respond to some self-portraits
by the painter Don Bachardy and they
were these craggy explorations of his aging face.
They were astonishing portraits, and this is
the poem that came from that.
"The Mirror"
"Once I had a cat who studied himself in the mirror.
He didn't know what it was in there, staring back at him,
but he couldn't stop looking because the face never turned
away, and eyes meeting eyes, want more seeing.
It's already dark.
No moonlight.
No whippoorwill, the bird that tormented my childhood,
refusing to take on the night without incessant song.
That bird must have been the size of a fire hydrant,
I thought then, but learned later it was just
a pip of feathered life with a voice
insistent as the news, that continuity
of disaster and argument to which we all belong.
Bomb and recruiting office, stoning in Public Square,
crude oil in everyone's hair.
To mosque, or not to mosque?
Don't turn away.
It's just the brute world that will outlive us,
the lean hard muscle of it, flexing.
But the birds don't belong.
They are settling into the night, their feathered quilts,
ready-made.
Some of them are rising out of their bodies, whole categories
of bodies and into the being of non-being,
where of course, we're all headed
after a few more parties and fixations of eyes upon eyes.
But first, who doesn't want to make something of it?
The clutch of childhood's solitary rages, and the way
the face begins to cave in on itself with age,
so that it looks like an Arizona landscape, all contour
and defile, telling the outcome of its story
to everyone, leaving out a few details
so that a person might stare at himself and say,
don't I know you from somewhere?
You look so familiar.
And yet--"