I had forgotten what she looked like,

hadn’t seen her for a while and she had come apart.

What’s there? Her dresses

her pajamas

the way she turns pages

turns keys

holds pencils.

Mostly fractured, broken, fading: The face,

a study in the way we forget.

Chuck Close deconstructs faces because

he can’t see them.

Her face distills like that from disuse,

distorts, dissolves.

I find her pieces in my pockets,

in the wrinkles of my bed sheets,

the holes for cuff-links in dress-shirts.

She peeks through my blinds,

She peeks from all the places of my

almost-sordid personhood.

When I notice her, she turns away.

Close then refashions faces

in layered rectangles of unexpected shades:

green, pink, blue, orange.

I haven’t found the wormhole to her bedroom,

her table, her spaces

in order to see her whole.

Matter warps that geometry.

So I try to piece her together like he would.

I snatch at fragments

to repaint her also,

in fewer dimensions, with more colors.