Mustache Longing

by Noah Berlatsky · August 22, 2013

beard2I.

The beards of grandmothers and the beards of grandfathers

are more real than the stars

and every evening gray falls in sidereal plaits

streaked by prayers as white as shampoo.

 

Predecessors, like you I would lie down to dream

and let my hair wash the light of the moon.

  

II.

 

Of course I resent my new beard!

Only yesterday I saw it perambulate from laundromat

to firmament and its curls were so magnificent

it transcended my chin for another.

 

O fickle goatee!

 

III.

 

Bluebeard

At night the darkness touches my face

and I think of my love’s black hair,

and at morning the dawn light touches my face

and I think of my love’s light hair.

So each moment is faithless and passes away

as love did, dark and fair.

 

My beard grows longer as I sleep

and when I wake I am not what I was,

and my beard grows longer as I walk

and when I arrive I am not what I was.

I alter and alter and yet it’s the same

– there is something in me without love.

IV.

 

Moses, Methuselah, Noah and Solomon

stroked the same white beard and furrowed the same frown.

“There’s a symmetry in being seer,” they said,

and smiled at daughters and sons too young to know

that prophets only lie in books, like dust,

and never speak their own dry words themselves.

“It is good,” patriarchs declare, “to be old enough

“to wear wisdom’s shroud as light as hair.”

 

Time, too, will make me regal and bland

as the impassive snow which holds the ground

in a mirage of evenness and silence, till the thaw

reveals only mud, the whiteness dry and gone.

 

Still, I’ll enjoy pretending that my cheeks don’t redden

because I’m unaffected by the sight of each new sun.


moustache2

V.

 

i.

 

The ocean is woven from the hair of the drowned

and the earth is the hair of the buried.

 

Thus we brush the world with fingers and teeth,

unknotting.

 

ii.

 

The living keep shifting the hair from their eyes

but the dead can see through hair.

 

Thus they never touch their eyes.

 

iii.

 

From baldness we grow without any effort at all,

and towards baldness we grow, without effort.

 

Albert Stabler is an illustrator. 

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Noah Berlatsky

Noah Berlatsky

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21 Comments

  1. anninyn +3

    “The living keep shifting the hair from their eyes

    but the dead can see through hair.

    Thus they never touch their eyes.”

    <3 <3

  2. anxious_mofo +3

    I like beards (a lot) but I got distracted by this: “has a book about the original Wonder Woman comics coming out in 2014.” !!!!

    But yes, I’m glad this piece found a home here too. The stanza about the patriarchs, especially.

    1. fondue with cheddar +1

      I like beards a lot, too. I’ve managed to talk most of my boyfriends into growing full beards, and they’re always happy with the result (especially goatee’d guys), so lucky me. 🙂

      And the Wonder Woman book does sound promising!

      Mustache longing—is that like penis envy?

      1. icebergmama +1

        really? I love goatees and really dislike full beards on young guys (on grandpas they are ok)

        1. fondue with cheddar +1

          But I’m old. 😉

          I used to be into goatees, but full beards mean non-prickly cheeks and I’m all about that. Plus, when goatees are unkempt I think they look worse than unkempt full beards (not Grizzly Adams beards, but a-little-overdue-for-a-trim beards).

      2. anxious_mofo +2

        I will say the greatest beard I have yet encountered was not accompanied by a mustache.

        Plus, metal dudes. With Viking beards.

      3. anninyn +3

        I’m not keen on beards, possibly because I have thin, sensitive irish skin and they give me a rash.

        My husbands facial hair grows very fast and if he stops shaving his stubble and plucking his eyebrows he becomes a pair of eyes lost in a forest of hair.

        1. fondue with cheddar +1

          That’s funny, because my skin in sensitive too, which is why I prefer beards. Freshly-shaven faces are fine, but by midday when the stubble starts growing in it’s too abrasive for me.

          A pair of eyes lost in a forest of hair…all I can picture is swamp boogers.

  3. mollyculetheory +10

    My mom once wrote a poem about Nietzsche’s mustache. I think it started like

    Nietzsche is growing his mustache.
    He has finished growing his mustache
    He is always growing his mustache
    His mustache is already beginning to grow.

          2. Brunhildenburg +2

            “It’s not that I don’t like Louie. I love Louie! I love everybody, that’s my thing, man…”

  7. antigonewiththewind

    I liked this a lot! It sort of reminded me of the Kelly Link story “The Cannon.”