How Many Faces Do You Have?

Book excerpt: How Many Faces Do You Have? is a poem sequence that interrogates intimacy, each poem a face the poet discovers, a reflection revealed in response to inner questioning. In a voice of quiet sonority, these lyrics journey from a high-school gym dance to a moonlit beach polka. They linger over sushi in Montreal and an airline meal at 40,000 feet on a flight. They touch joy and pain and celebrate the vicissitudes of love that goes “into the tangled heartland / where there is no trail,” as a gift of being. A face is such a strange thing. Obsessed with distortion, Modigliani loved elongated faces like Tamara’s at a distance, a flattened oval, two black jewels. He painted with a dagger in his teeth, they say, to see the face within the face — grave, cold-eyed as Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt, whom I’ve always loved for her name alone.