Self-Portrait of a Face That Isn’t Mine

What about the man who cannot touch 
anyone without them morphing 
into the only woman he loved and lost? Not recklessly,
but like a river diverted by a stone’s weight, 
muted, yet turbulent. Each interaction— 
the divorcée in a dim-lit bar, exchanging 
coins with a cashier, the colleague who leaned in 
after a meeting. Then, they all bore her face. 
The curl of her hair, a script on rumpled sheets, 
in the morning. She had cautioned, 
while eating breakfast, don’t keep a part of me 
here. Get new things. Let go of us 
when I leave. Yet, what of the claw 
of a hair clip clung to the sprawling 
mother of thousands? What she dreamt. 
Stone and rust to create pigments 
from maggoted-mud. The emerald 
suspended between her collarbones as she read 
a dog-eared Lorca, repeating: 
Green, how I long for you, green. After her, 
the man pried open a chrysalis 
with the swiftness of unmasking royalty, 
mistaking it for an exotic fruit. Inside, 
only the unbirth of a monarch. A deceptive 
womb. Who hasn’t slipped into the heart 
of lovers to take on a different geometry? 
Finally, he extended his palms 
at the train station, yearning 
to embrace strangers, to touch 
every stranger into recognition. Look, 
this is how we endure: grief’s shadow 
following like the moon in a supermarket lot 
as a child. In the end, he pressed his hands 
to his face, feeling the contours shift, 
an alchemy akin to wings sprouting on a 
creature unacquainted with flight.