Rembrandt

Rembrandt Faces

Face frowning, fierce, feeling, florid, a fulsome landscape

The golden boy of a certain Amsterdam age

Handsome devil, while it lasted

Half-philosopher, half-performance-artist

His eyes on the spectacle of speculum

Hair frays or displays, eyes glint, gaze or sadden -

Turning the pages of his gallery catalogue.

The line of the mouth speaks a hundred moods

The search is rarely skin-deep truth to tell,

This is the question and this is the answer full frontal

Dutch landscapes brought indoors, to candlelight.    

I, so, oh so isolated here in the old mirror

With shaving brush or tortoise-shell comb,

Face familial familiar and not any younger, yet young

As this morning: tongue, teeth, eyebrows, darn cheek.

The story goes on, resolutely less Narcissus

Thinking of another, you and others, out from isolation

Who together made this face just who it is.

Eye sag, here ear hair, holy moley, furrowed forehead

It hardly seems a moment since that moment

I broke also down isolation into failsafe friendship

Had all the answers, hair all question-marks.