Djelloul Marbrook

I’m too cold this afternoon to draw any metaphysical conclusions, but my fingers are limber enough to report a strange occurrence. I dragged my cranky body to a photo shoot Monday. I needed a portrait of the old crank for Far From Algiers, my book of poetry which last July won Kent State University’s Wick Prize. The only photo I had was dated and a bit posed.

Jim (J. Gerard) Smith, the photographer, is justly celebrated and a lovely human being too, so I was looking forward to seeing him, but I felt that no matter what I did I would produce what my wife Marilyn refers to as my “ayatollah scowl.” I prefer to think of it as my osprey look, you know, that look ospreys give sailors when the sailors steer too close to osprey nests on pilings.

Well, osprey or ayatollah, I was definitely giving Jim that look. My smiles were like stale cookies, and I could imagine readers thinking, Who wants to read anything by a guy who looks like that? (I myself will read anything by an osprey and nothing by an ayatollah).

Then Jim had an idea. He brought out a plate of glass and soon had Marilyn spraying it with a mix of water and glycerine. Behind this glass my face relaxed, dropped its guard, and began to look like my poems. The best ones, anyway. The pointillistic face in the video was hardly the face that had been grimacing for more than an hour. It looked like the person I know myself to be, not the pained severity we had been looking at.

The experience prompted me to contemplate how often in encounters the face we project, or the face being read by another, belongs to a set of thoughts and emotions irrelevant to the moment. We’re not prepared for the moment at hand; our faces are somewhere else, and yet we’re stuck with the way we’re perceived at that moment.

Something about distancing myself from Jim behind glycerine and water had stripped away my guardedness. I sat there steeped in an odd feeling that I understood this process. As best as I can make of it, it’s like that moment when you’ve written a poem or half a poem and you realize it’s okay but not honest enough. It’s guarded. So you cross out lines and then stanzas and you sit there waiting for the real poem to happen. When Far From Algiers is published in August perhaps you’ll see what I mean. Perhaps I’ll see what I mean.

—DM