II. A Face ____________________ ____________________ ____________________ ____________________ ___________________ ____________________ ____________________ ____________________
after
Presence by Mary Frank
“I
knew I would have to destroy the piece.”
To reach the house you cross a creek on a wooden bridge. . .
All stories
begin with place,
the path
there. This one begins
in
the Catskills, begins
with
the terra cotta women
whose
nature it is
to
lie down –
or
fly.
Ten years have passed since her daughter died
in the Amazon crash,
in the flames
.
. . and it’s autumn again:
azaleas,
poppies, irises,
black-eyed
Susans, nasturtiums – all
collapsed
into rags, reduced
and
returned
to
the softened garden
at
Lake Hill House, where the story begins,
where
the kiln
will
not know fire till spring.
Autumn now.
To reach the house. . .
She
has no wish to reach the house;
she
has left the house
and
the cold of the Catskills,
left –
with the last clay face unfinished,
there,
on the workbench:
one
clay woman
begun
like others: shoulders and throat;
the bones
of a face;
eyes
lowered, lips parted
to
speak with the broken
strength
of the stricken to heart;
lips
parted, yes, but the speaking
stunned
shut.
To reach the house. . .
this
face has crossed
no
bridge,
has
taken no path.
This face was born in the kiln house and found
unworthy of fire.
On the workbench, the face begins to reach
back
into earth, out
into
air
(to
lie down –
or
fly)
Late autumn. No fire now in the lake house;
well below freezing; the face has begun
to crack open. . . but no,
more
precisely,
cracks
open
in her
and
move to the surface,
open
precisely where bone comes closest
to
skin (but she has no bone);
where flesh has thinned to assume the contours
of human beauty
(her
beauty is not
human,
it comes
of
fingertips and thumbs, comes
of
the pressed cup of the artist’s palm.
no
bone, no flesh,
only
earth
abandoned
here, and no fire now
till
spring.)
Cracks cross the face through days
unbroken from nights, through nights
undivided by days.
The
surface tightens, the eyelids thin
to
admit thin light
to
the dark interior space on which
the closed
eyes fix. Her lips
listen
at the edge.
She is still.
And in her, the source of the stillness
moves.
She dreams
(if she dreams)
as Demeter
dreamed: of herself, returned
to a winter in which
she was always queen – and had no daughter.
All stories
begin with place, the path there.
Deep in winter
and safe in the city, the artist dreams of an early work,
her first Moving Woman, a figure
born from a fact (a photo. a nightmare.)
a woman
clothed in gasoline and set aflame;
golden
in gasoline, lit
and
fleeing.
A flesh-and-blood woman, from whose burning skin
a clay figure rose
to
fly in a nightmare beauty, to fly
for
ever (she is flying now,
except, in this dream, she is flying
through
jungle).
And now in the dream, the artist,
the mother,
returns
alone, she’s crossing a bridge, a threshold, a floor
to
a face on a table, unbroken,
a
face she remembers leaving.
The
air
is
white in the dream, and hers
is
the only breath left.
Even
the snakes and mice
have
curled into sleep in their nests inside
the
reclining women,
whose
terra cotta beauty is fixed forever,
by
fire; women
inhabited
now, all winter; women
who
lie in the fields –
or
fly.
Late winter.
To reach the house now you would move
through hemlocks and mountain laurel,
move down the paths of the flower beds, move
over dead nasturtiums, dead cosmos,
dead
asters and lilies,
and boulders, the boulders, too, dead.
Spring. She returns.
The face on the workbench
is
broken so deeply it can’t
be
mended, can’t be fired,
and can’t
(but
why not? it’s earth, only earth)
be
destroyed.
(It must be destroyed.)
To reach a future mouth and eyes,
you
travel the cracks
through
spring and back in time across
a winter’s
landscape of absence.
All spring she watches the cracks advance, reaching
toward eyes and mouth, the places a face gives
itself
away;
where
the face we were given
is
first taken back;
where
at last we take back
ourselves.
Places of so deep a beauty,
we can’t, we can’t. . .
but
she knows she must.
All stories begin with place, the cracks there.
Late summer,
the garden has grown so full, the kiln
casts a petaled shadow. Soon
she
will cast the face in a bronze so golden
it
might, itself,
be
flame.
(The
beautiful, broken face,
unmended.)
The fissures will breathe and hold and be
the bone,
and soon the skin will burn with a sky patina,
and the face become
Presence:
the
place all stories end.