Where the Face Cannot Look
The great face looks out into the forest. Sunlight finds the ridge of its nose, the broad, weathered lips; the seams between its stones stay dark. Behind it, other faces emerge from the masonry, each with its own portion of shadow. Before them, leaves beyond counting.
The forest has a thousand directions. Branch crosses branch; a bright leaf hangs before a darker one; small openings of sky disappear into the green. The great face has only one direction, and keeps it. Its worn mouth is so near that abundance, so wholly unable to follow even a single leaf, that the space between them begins to feel strangely intimate.
Above the brow, in a joint between stones, a few slender stems have taken root. Their leaves catch the same light as the face below. The forest has come close enough to touch the stone where the face cannot look.
More from the Library
The Leaf and the Pencil
A leaf holds my attention. Then I remember that I can draw. The pencil reveals things I had never noticed, but introduces its own demands: proportion, shading, the desire to make something beautiful. When I try to describe the encounter, language presents another difficulty. An essay about the uncertain distance between looking at something, understanding it, and being present with it.
The Work We Return To
We have become very good at measuring persistence, and less good at asking what deserves it.
A musician begins the same passage again. A writer returns to an unfinished sentence. Someone stands before a familiar face carved in stone, with nothing new to photograph.
What brings us back when enthusiasm has gone? And how do we distinguish devotion from the demands that quietly consume the rest of our lives?
Under the Gallery
Rain, a carved hand, and the small movements of lives separated by centuries. A new literary piece from The Vow.