Remarking
on faces on Mass Street
Bert Haverkate-Ens
This has been said before
but I frequently see remarkable faces.
Yet I feel it bears repeating.
Two such faces just walked by the bench where I sit.
I’m afraid I don’t have the ability
to do justice to all these faces.
Earlier, there was this astonishingly beautiful face of a
young woman,
the wind cunningly blowing wisps
of her straight dark hair
across her face as she tried to talk
on her phone.
But hers is not the face
I would have you focus on –
it will be easily noticed without my help.
There was an older man sitting on a bench farther down the
street,
a soft smile, the sun on his pale scalp,
only wisps remaining…
But oh, there are so many other remarkable faces, but never
mind.
There’s no use my writing yet more words that will likely be
overlooked.
See these remarkable faces for yourself,
if you will.
This round-face boy with a sippy cup just stumbled by
in the company of two more
remarkable faces.
I will probably only have this
one chance to see them.
Bert Haverkate-Ens
As I was going to St. Ives,
I met a man with only one wife,
as far as I know,
each wife had two Corgies,
as far as I know.
The man had silver in his
well-trimmed beard,
but he flipped his shell over his head,
walked it to the river,
and turned it back into the water.
He rowed away, gently, downstream.
Then as I was returning from St. Ives,
he was pulling on his oars,
pulling upstream with
his arms and shoulders,
his back and legs,
his mind -
as he approached a blinding patch of early morning reflected
sunlight,
halfway across the smooth
surface of the river,
I raised my hand;
then with the faint splash of one oar,
he vanished into a blaze of glory,
never to be seen by mere mortal men again.
walktokaw.blogspot.com
Recollecting Faces
Bert Haverkate-Ens
When I walk, I see people.
Their gait from a distance.
Their glancing look past me.
The fraction-of-a second smile of a stranger
when sometimes our eyes meet.
In the future I will wear a camera implanted behind my left eye.
Facial recognition software will lock on to each face -
the pretty, the weathered, the happy, the disengaged.
With a blink I will register emotion, personality.
Perhaps I will capture an image of their soul.
But for now when I see people,
their faces pass by,
the toothpick in their mouth fading with each step,
the curve of their cheek blurs,
the upturned crease at the corner of an eye
is not etched, only echoes, in my memory.
I do not wish to meet all the people I see,
but I would like to remember them,
and if I could, I would carry some of their passing looks
in my pocket,
and when the sidewalk emptied
I would sit on the bench by the river
and thumb through the pictures of the lives
who had brushed past mine
and wonder just what they were thinking
at that particular moment.
Life at the Kansas Relays
Bert Haverkate-Ens
If I tried to tell you she had an exquisite face,
I could only fail.
It was perfect like a pearl.
It was young like the dew at sunrise.
It was animated like the brook just burbling from the
glistening snow bank at midday.
It was smooth like Mary’s Lake at dusk.
Her eyes were her eyes.
Her every feature and line were hers.
And then she half-turned towards me.
And then she was laughing and waving at the jumbotron.
Her face,
there,
next to this much older, puffy, red-faced ogre.
If I were her grandfather,
I might have reached out my hand and touched her mocha
cheek.
I might have asked her how her race had gone.
And then, like a fawn, she skipped away.
walktokaw.blogspot.com
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