The Transit Hall on Pier 86
They say there’s a place in the brain for faces
and I believe it, this headache a claw
into raw nerves, the strain of testing
so many men’s faces for my one “Father”
as the boat empties and the transit hall
fills with women, children, and one plausible man
after another whose face dissolves
with study. For a moment each one
could be him, ruddy, regular, a gaze returned
into my face, which has its own brain
place also working hard to make
something recognizable as a daughter
out of so many raw nerves. The looking and the looked-at
swim – these places in the brain are wet, gelid,
something out of Coelenterata that starts to wave
at this handsome new father until his hard
square eyes break my floundering smile
into one more mistake. A decade is long
when you are twenty. The long hall rings
with “Hello’s!”, feet on pavement, the clamoring
embrace. When I see him, I am alone,
and at his eyes, drop my own, ashamed
I tried so many strangers on, itinerants against
the one face that goes here, and whose eyes
I could have lost when they are the same
as mine. Mine that I work to raise, bringing up
a woman’s face out of a child’s, and offering my father
a hand, dry and outstretched.
