Faced With a Mirror of Words
Gregg Williard
There’s a horizontal line under my mouth and
across my chin that looks like a scar and comes, I
think, from tensing facial muscles to push open my
right nostril, usually blocked by some congenital
design flaw in the inner structure of my nose, which,
from the outside, has a peculiar downward jut at the
tip that makes others think it has been broken (I’m
pleased to hear from a fight) and makes me think, when
seen in profile with two mirrors, of the distinctive
bend in the wing of the German Stuka dive bomber that
strafed and harried the fleeing British troops on the
shores of Dunkirk in W.W.II, scenes of which fill a
novel that I’m reading now by Ian MacEwen, called
Atonement, reminding me that whenever I look at
myself, my face, my life as a face, I see stories and
flesh, sometimes stories in flesh, sometimes machines
in flesh or flesh as machines while believing that
surely I, we, are selves somewhere inside our bodies,
behind our faces, but also in some sense formed, maybe
strafed and harried by forces outside of us that leave
scars, and that some of the most powerful are
industrial, political, ideological, corporate, while
understanding that forces inside of us are just as
powerful, and for some people more formative, than the
externally imposed or impressed ones, and that my
face, the story of any face, really, may be a
narrative contest, or a contested narrative, between
inner and outer forces, the subjective versus the
objective, the body (and face) as a thing among
things, the meat machine versus the soul or the spirit
or the mind or the ghost in it, swimming under our
cheeks and behind our eyes, or punching out our lights
from outside with eurekas of grace and mayhem, or from
both directions at once, like rival engineers or
sculptors, one tunneling and blasting from within, the
other weathering and tanning and stropping and
treating as some hide might be treated, from without,
or maybe my face as the mediation between the two,
like how my straight thin lips were written by
genetically encoded adjustments to my ancestor’s
Northern European chill and dark and, maybe, (in a
mysterious transmogrification of spirit to flesh) my
mouth shaped by the social/theological chill and dark
of Protestantism and also, in this incarnation, by
something that happened in me or to me around seventh
grade, before which
my lips were so bright and wet and full that I was
accused of wearing lipstick, resulting in frenzies of
rubbing and wiping to make them a grim, dry, manly,
stoic slash, and in succeeding pursuing women with
full lips, then Jewish women with full lips, and then
short Jewish women with full lips, and then athletic
short Jewish women with full lips, as if I wanted to
find the full red lips of my early life’s trajectory
before it was changed, maybe deflected or bent, like
light in a prism, or the angle of the Stuka’s wing,
from a face and body that was all vivid light and
athleticism before sports taught it to squint and shun
the sun, and to lose myself in books to escape
education, and on to 30 years hard drinking and bitter
laughter that might have spooned hollows in my cheeks,
carved lines around my eyes and across my forehead a
little deeper than they otherwise might have been, and
darkened the shadows under my blue eyes that, against
ginger white hair and white skin no longer show a blue
eyed face but a face with twin piercings of BB-shot
black, like (as some might quip) two piss holes in the
snow, or like little pokes in the pupils of a huge
Russian icon or Japanese animae eyes that hold me in
a thousand watt stare of blank consolation for my dye
cast life mask of paper skin harried by ink and bent ghosts.
***
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