A Stranger's Face

Tender with age and smallness like a rustic quarter
Perfectly cut around the edges
As if filed carefully
But burdened with spots
Decorating the jaw line of a face:
Modest in the warm light of love
A surface touched and rubbed
Like an infant’s velvet hand:
Polished with attention
Alive in the eyes with youth-
A swirling green-gray like the offspring of clouds and earth
And I’ll never smell the rush of cold water
From where they are born,
But they hold me down like gravity to understand
The damages
of being so small, but so proud