Your face the surface of the earth reshaped: the icecaps of your eyes, your continental cheekbones with their chiseled mountain ranges, the abyss of your open-mouthed smile. The magnetic fields of your hair.
         We zoom out: your face among the poetic stars. A constellation so abstract, only a Greek navigator could love it, we used to laugh. Now I’ll make Venus your teardrop, around which everything revolves. I lie on the grass all night and watch you circle overhead. In the morning I am dewed by your condensing interstellar breath.
         In the morning also, the protruding adorable ears of the sedan’s chrome side mirrors, and the dimple in the finish of the header panel. I used to travel the bridge of your nose, crest your brow. I drive, I park in the driveway to the tsks of your engine, and now I’m home. I trip and almost fall onto the face of your misfit flagstones, in the shadow of the sun under the dovehouse wall, the shifting leaves of the boxwoods. Steady: your face in the house key, nipping my palm. The patterns in the mudroom linoleum. From the soles of my shoes to the kitchen with its expressions in the range to the nursery with the recombining mobile above the crib to little Anna’s fontanelle, your little round face with its little retroussé nose. Sluggish and startled I see approaching me from the bedroom your face the face of my sister displacing, pressing outward from under her skin, from inside the blood, emplacing your beautiful face.
         Your wrinkles in the skin of these pages. Apostrophized by Keats, by Blake delineated, sung about by all the greats, those poets. Thy gracious self, which is the god of my idolatry. In the arcs of history your frowns. This long line of windows, your gleaming teeth. These piano keys the same, your smile. The metronomic tic of your pulse. The buttons on my shirt, your wee round face.
         I think about you: I’m drunk and I’m sad and I want you to come here and kiss me. I say to my sister: I’m drunk and sad and I want you to fuck off. Then in the smashed glass of the wineglass I acknowledge your mischievous glint; I recall your sudden laughter in the slamming of the patio door. Your rouged eyeshadowed face in the calico pattern of my sister’s retreating blouse. The baby’s cries are your cries, and that’s the only reason I listen.
         My phone rings, I see you in the screen. I decline the call, I block your number. I wrap the baby in her patterned blanket, I feed her with your bottled milk-white face. The door opens and my sister returns seriously to sit down beside me. She says, let’s try this again, let me take her, and I let her take away your little baby’s face.
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