Facial Blindness, by Susan Cowger

Self Portrait, by Chuck Close (USA) 1997.

Facial Blindness
                      ~for Chuck Close
 
Pencil lines square off  
A face doomed by a certain blindness
Where no paint stroke equals hair and no mouth is yours
You—are sienna scumbles          vermillion daubs
   
Only a stab at pupils and pores         yesterday’s Fu Manchu
Perhaps no pigment clinches facial recognition
May I present to you        lozenges     green and umbra
Oil mingled in soft dirt       not exactly
 
Resemblance     more a work-around
For prosopagnosia*         awareness without emotion
The rind-and-peel after-taste       of pungent cerulean     
A wink of capricious colour  
 
Shaped like a simile
Sidling up to a mirror
 
Susan Cowger

*prosopagnosia: the inability to recognize faces of other people or one’s own features in a mirror

Susan Cowger’s chapbook, Scarab Hiding, was released December 2006.  Her work most recently appeared in Windhover, Adanna, Perspectives, CRUX, and McGuffin. Susan is founder and past editor of Rock & Sling: A Journal of Witness.