FACELESS

Faceless

I couldn’t see you there. So much time had gone by,

that my memory fails to put things right.

I can’t place you, in your own face. Your lips seem different, set against

saying what it is about you I’ve missed.

I press you—if it’s really you—for how you’ve been since

the lockdowns, how time got away from us.

With all your old energy and more than I remember,

you tell me you’re writing poetry now,

that you’ll write me, too, when there’s time. When it’s time.

When you were down and out, it bounced you back

to place yourself in relation to how hard it’s been and lighthearted you

you must be, to strike that perfect balance.

Going Off Script

I hadn’t the nose for it. To follow the smoke, the flow

of mists from peaks to valleys… I couldn’t.

Too far, they take me back. Too often, memories like that

reduce me to ashes, burning so deep.

The rains tap at my windows. Petals brush the puddles,

the sun paints me in another corner

of the earth, the moon inks my phasing in and out with it,

and I find tears of yours staining the page

I’d promise to turn for good. At my desk, all I can do is waver.

Our word then as now has been paper thin.

Turning it over, as I have every stone, there you were,

your imprint a blur that’s been bleeding through

before our love had been bled dry. I find myself in your footsteps

more often than my own. I feel my way

through your wisdom, though the day goes darker and darker,

as though there’s no end in sight, only the

beginning returning to us, the sense of promise

dispersing what I’d come to be sure of.

With you, it’s never been so uncertain. With you, my days

sink under their own weight, the wait too much

to bear. With you, it’s a fog where there’s no coming back the

same way, even if I post signs along

the path. The trouble with that is I don’t know the language

one day to the next, let alone, the script.

Returning means deciphering both in one, when I hadn’t

the first clue to crack what I meant to you.

The rain’s pouring now. It’s likely the windowpane won’t hold.

It’s hell, how it pops, how the glass melts down.

Heartbeats

Heartbeats, in which the soul drums, upon which love plays its part,

will you keep time when I’m left at your loss?

Heartbeats, I feel you at my throat, choking back the tears

meant for my love’s eyes alone. I hear

the echo of hoofbeats as my soul grows more and more distant,

driven off its course scored into the stars.

Heartbeat, answer for what’s been decided when I wasn’t listening.

Speak for my love though it’s been spoken for.

Tell me what the oracle broke off midsentence, breaking

for me instead a branch of dead laurel.

Take this heart and clear the waters I muddied, getting into

trouble with the unseen authorities.

Heartbeat, the path is for the both of us, for my step to

fall into time with your answering it,

for the sun’s blood to soak the dust of our going to

the end of our days, its road unending.

Heartbeat, I’ll tell you of the things you alone have the

feel for. Of the hills we went around, to

lay low from heaven knows. I’ll show you the knife they

parted a child from her shadow, paring

family trees away to make flutes for their own funeral marches.

Heartbeat, I’ll break the truth to you about

the music you alone can shape, when you take the pains to hear

of the forms our souls take as your lyrics.

Recognition of Your Old Self

First from handwriting, then from photographs, I got

the picture of what you were like, the way

you used to be. Traces emerged all around. All the signs

suddenly immersing what I thought lost

with this moment of realization, that you were never gone.

I just didn’t know it. I sit at the

desk you once did, when it sat by the window, looking out

at your path. I’m shaded by the same trees,

just, they never came to light for me until thirty years later.

I look at your old self in that photo—

her eyes lowered on ancient inscription, her attention soaking up

some archival text recovered from ash.

I look back on the moment our eyes finally met, how

anxious you were, stepping out of the frame,

afraid you weren’t what I pictured you to be after these

long years leading to our being together.

Now I read the signs clearly. Now, more than memories

in flame the two of us, now our stories

join to give the full picture, the beginning and the end

coming full circle, making our love work

on all that unfinished business scattered in the archive.

All those times left to be continued that

the future’s now come to process, tomorrow’s archivist

moving the hands on the clock back over

your past. In some peculiar way, we knew each other beforehand,

before ever laying our eyes bare on

the other. I’d felt where your fingers have been, though

I’d traced the writing you’d made your living—

The letters you’d given some special touch, addressed to a

better tomorrow that’s just now happened.

Between us, it was a long time coming. Almost, too long,

how narrow, the chance of our paths crossing—

how open we could be, living side by side with only

a couple decades separating us.

Garrett Bruner archives ancient Greek script related materials and serves as a site archivist for an ongoing excavation on the Bay of Naples, Italy. His interest in antiquity began through its poetry, but his reading encompasses as many eras and as many directions as possible. Some poets he reads the most of are Akhmatova, Ovid, Cavafy, Meng Hao-Jan, and Rachel Korn. He has been writing poetry daily since 2016 and his poetry is forthcoming in The North Dakota Quarterly. He lives in Austin, Texas.