Lines On My Face

Decades now of looking back at it— in some old satellite’s rearview mirror, say— has something to show beyond the folds and feeders, the volumes of magma risen into native rock or the buried flow of old fires cooling in ocean beds. The damage has been memorized. Tool marks left by loose doubts dragged across a certainty. Tongues of river sediment slumped but still flickering in the eye. And how pale the surfaces are! From miles above what even to others is familiar, the erosion—tears that freeze and crack the heart, small habits a wind blasts against whatever’s exposed—seems apparent: all’s worn down, weathered, notched, seeping, yet eerily polished, as if at last defined. Your map of me? Let your pencil trace the old quarries and splintered outcrops, let it analyze the faults, describe their throes, let it reveal how the light is laid over them all.