Upon Your Face

Upon Your Face
                   -for Dr. Rock and David

I enter the colonial blue room
with grief, and find myself among
small French paintings, stunned,
disconsolate and disbelieving.

I come here to close myself off
from the world, no longer exposed
beneath the high glass ceiling
that dangles Calder’s iron birds.

No sunlight here, only artificial
light and representations of lives past,
appropriate to this sensation of grief;
a muffled and aimless existence.

For days following your death
I sit silent before The Beach at Villerville,
entranced after finding you there,
your long chin and dark rough hair,

yes I am sure it is you, painted
a century ago under an overcast sky,
the same face I see now between closing
doors or turning corners faster than I.

You are no hallucinatory ghost
and I almost do not recognize your face
after so many months of you gasping
beneath the cover of an oxygen mask.

But there you are, dressed in a black suit,
bow tie, a gray overcoat flapping open
under the peach sky, the wind billowing
the hoop skirts of your companions.

Who were you then? And who now?
Are you conscious, breathing, bloody,
in another life or time, or are you the blinding
light and joy some believe is the reward,

for being good, being saintly, as I must
think that you were, as we all do.
What life will you lead next time-
will I be your father then, and you my son?

I stare hard at the pale face of you
and your friends; they look half-toward
one another and half toward the sky,
what is before them, splits their vision.

I do not know how long I sit gazing
at this arc of overcast twilight sky
where the sun breaks through in thin bands
against clouds like iridescent curls of shell,

but there is a moment it seems
you turn your face to look back at me
from that scene on the beach
where a black top hat flits over wet sand,

a little black dog sits at your feet
and the sand is dotted here and there
with black, straight-backed chairs,
I smile at our meeting again,

believing this scene is as it should be,
a gentle time and light, for a kind
man, sweet father, now undone;
though your luminous face remains.

I rise to leave, knowing with certainty,
that I will always happen upon your face-
your eyes in a crowd, body in a doorway,
your voice in my dreams, an unexpected grace.