HER SMILE
(For Marie Clementine)
To mean anything,/ a container must store/ a visible substance./ We destroy them, melt them/ all together, make them/ into new versions/ of what they were already,/ fill them again./ Bottomless refills...From “Bottomless” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 11-21-11
Hija mia, donde esta su sonrisa bella?
Where is your lovely smile, my child?
As if on cue, a pair of glistening eyes
brighten her quick grin flashed on a
fitsful of face now suddenly larger
than the gaping windows around her.
Barely dry from the ripples of a womb,
how could this infant speak a world
of adoring mime, a soundlessly gentle
smile that might as well be the sunrise?
Is this the hidden world of a refilled
vessel, a venerable ghost in a new cup
of meaning come back to remind us
whence we come, a happy other place?
There and here are a plenitude of grace,
where nothing is destroyed, where old
is new and a tandem of the eternal,
sprung from a gyre’s ever spinning cycle.
A lover’s smile perhaps from a past
that is always present; a stored glass
brimming with what it already held?
Is this, therefore, a bottomless refill?
Like a roadside cafe’s vending, does this
offer our parched lips with moistened
remembrances of ever tender kisses
that we slept by, warm and gentle still?
De donde esta su sonrisa bella, hija?
Whence come your lovely smile, my girl?
---Albert B. Casuga
11-28-11
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