"The Faces I Love"
By Gary Joseph Cohen
17 Mar 2009
"The Faces I Love" is a poem I return to every so often by Gerald Stern. It reads something like a somber epilogue, written in the voice of an aging poet making his bed, or perhaps settling into his own grave. "In the end my own stillness will save me;/in the end the leopard will walk away from me in boredom/and trot after something living, something violent/and warm to excite him before his death." The reader who stumbles upon this poem is no different than the reader who stumbles upon Bresson's shadowy figure jumping over a puddle behind a train station. In the spirit of revision and honesty, I will replace "the reader" with "this reader," and confess that for every rain storm I commute beneath and through and around, "Behind the Gare St. Lazare" instantaneously blooms from the green pith of my brain stem. I become the hatted shadow, heel to heel with my own reflection. Likewise, when photographing on the street, there are faces that pull these lines out of into the open; faces so familiar, I can't relinquish them anymore than own; faces I can't leave behind:
"In the end I will have my own chair.
I will pull the blinds down and watch my nose and mouth
in the blistered glass.
I will look back in amazement at what I did
and cry out loud for two more years, for four more years,
just to remember the faces, just to recall the names,
to put them back together–
the names I can't forget, the faces I love."
-Gerald Stern (originally published in 1981, 'The Red Coal')
-GJC
4 responses
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Gary Joseph Cohen added a link (17 Mar 2009):
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Joy B gave props (17 Mar 2009):
Marvelous!
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Jim Hart gave props (17 Mar 2009):
more great portraits -- love all of them
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Sherry Davis Johnson gave props (9 Jul 2009):
Phenominal portrait. I am awestruck by the texture and clarity. Brilliant.
