Doughfaces

On display in a poorly arranged glass case
alongside musket muzzles
and the collapsing tannin cursive
of soldiers’ letters home
hang two old masks of fragile cotton,
unexpected and strange,
surprising me like a story I never really thought was true:
doughfaces,
ghostheads meant to hide all but eyes,
a wedge of mouth
and the blunt stub buttons
of drunk men’s piggy noses.
Pale and holding the light fiercely,
they glare through glass:
screens, thinning.
My grandma used to tell us stories
of men her daddy called the serenaders,
of how they’d come to shout and act the fool
outside her outsized Southern family’s shanty windows
on Christmas Eve,
of how they plugged up
the ragged rocky chimney
after what they sang was gone,
filling up the cold with smoke
and the poverty of winter mischief.
Still, some kind of distributive miracle
came into how she talked:
an ascetic glory rising up out of that
single shared sack of oranges,
the crescents split and nibbled down
to every last string and crumb
of acidic white rind,
a sacrament of juice on chins
and tongues on knuckles,
savoring the way a single traveling seed
held taste,
despite a trick,
despite invasion.