He shaves his jaws every Friday morning during a gap; nine slides into
ten.
It is at this between-hour that he
soaps and lathers his chops
at the squared white sink in the
downstairs female bathroom of
a dark red brick building whose
crenellations seem to me
to have jutted up from sacred
Mali.
A bathroom is a choking space, too
easily do slide from walls
the trappings of human excess, while
cold white tiles do little to
persuade us that we are not indeed
inside a warm and living form.
And each Friday, at this sliding
hour, his low-pitched wooded smell
accords with the putrid delicate
variations and shifting harmonious
bands of female vanitas and shame.
It is I who am waiting in line
behind you, old man, who am
holding in hope and wavering at the edge
of the fir green fabric
at the edge of your darkened skin. A
deep round scar, no bigger than
a five cent piece, at the fold of
your right eye, alabaster soap and dark
hands, life-darkened like my
father's hands, they too have been lathed too
often, by thin - one might even
say innocent - blades of time and
solid matter, to ever come clean
again.
I have felt the possible weigh upon
me.
I have seen the becoming-spherical
of the object.
I have been shown its curving-away
face.
There is noise now. The scraping
blade in the sliding hour whose,
for a fifty odd of Fridays and
all the ones that count, metal has done
battle against persistent sons who
rise are mowed who rise again.
I hear them all.
