HER SMILE

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

fistful 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