The Secret Face of Love
By Willis Barnstone
The secret face of love changes her name.
Was it Lily, God or Francesca? Plato gave her
a good face, spoke a synposium about her.
Chaucer's nun with eyes as gray as glass
wore a coral rosary about her comely arm
and a necklace of green beads dangling
a brooch of gold, saying, Amor vincit omnia.
Some whisper whore at her or say she's dead.
She is an insomniac. I am her inconstant
scribe since my passion changes. I hurt her
and her face suffers. So does mine.
Her face is always with me. She is my father.
I call her woman, first love, old love, new love.
I touch her unknown face. She's in the papers
but no nuclear threat. Do not bomb her. We
are lovers. Day moves to dust, dusk to night.
It is dark. She is the one I've always loved,
here with me now. Sleeping. We are wed,
illegitimate, warm flesh. A lily is a day of
eternity. In oblivion she is tender in my arms
and in my sleep, I gaze at her gazing face.
--------
A poem for
I had a nice day, other than my father biting my head off at dinner for saying I thought the Senate should at least ask Roberts certain questions before confirming him; I have now been assured that if the Democrats don't have a chance of winning the next three elections it is my personal fault, so now you all know who to blame. :p I did laundry and wrote articles in the morning so I could go have lunch with
Then we went to The Walnut Tree because I wanted to look at silver rings to see if they had a snake to go with my wolf and dog (shut up) and although they did have a snake I ended up getting a ring with a stone on top hiding a pentacle which is actually much more my style, and then after doing some chores in Gaithersburg I realized that I really did not need to keep trying to crush my wedding ring on my finger after wearing it more than 15 years (and the engagement ring nearly 20) and stopped at the mall to see about getting them resized. I feel rather weird wearing a pagan ring rather than a wedding ring for a week but now I will not have to keep hand lotion in my purse to make sure that I can get my rings off when my fingers swell up in the heat like we had today.
In the evening we had terrible thunderstorms, though first I picked up my kids from camp and dropped them off at my parents' so my father could take them to his pool; the original plan had been for them to go with their cousin who is visiting, but my sister's middle daughter has an ear infection and ended up not being able to swim. I am really, really hoping the heat has broken now that we've had the storms, as we have plans to go to Annapolis over the weekend and I don't see how that will be tolerable if it's 95 degrees even though I'm sure the Naval Academy museum is air conditioned. We all ended up having dinner at my parents', hence ending up discussing politics with my father who has no sense of what it is appropriate to say and more significantly how it is appropriate to say it around children; he also wanted to know whether I'd heard if they'd found the dead girl in Aruba and whether I thought the space shuttle was going to blow up and things like that, all at the dinner table. Sometimes I realize why people are so keen to discuss Brad Pitt...
Four-year-old dolphin Spirit gets a rubdown from one of the trainers after showing off for visitors in the dolphin auditorium.
In the rainforest, the great green parrots...
...and some kind of mouse which we were hoping was part of the exhibit and not someone's dinner.
The sea turtle that lives in the ray tank because it's missing its left front fin after an encounter with a fishing net and can no longer survive in the wild.
A caiman in the Amazon exhibit.
And oh, yeah, fish! We liked these because they looked like they were stuffed -- you can see the stitches on their sides. *g*
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