Updike once wrote that our faces are like dams,
cracking beneath the strain of life
Destined to break, our sorrows eventually
To pour visibly forth from our shattered walls

I think sometimes our faces are more what is held back,
Those dark opaque poolings of condensed elements
Brightened with day light, reflexively cool.
We have not been built so protective by any alliterative foresight

Besides, a dam holds back a known mineral,
lacks the enigmatic quality of a deep well
shaped and eroded slowly by mysterious currents.
Water hides under its placid exterior all we cannot perceive

So we pass on the street, liquid bodies flowing in confluence
before bending apart, and we flinch with knowledge,
a façade so similar to ours, and feel wise,
feel we have found some purposeful answer

lurking in the shallows of a smile
rippling away in dimples as if a leaf had fallen.
Then we hear that a man in Austria, an engineer
well recognized about his town

has imprisoned his own daughter for twenty four years,
raped her, fathered seven incestuous children, even let one die,
all while sharing a bed with his wife, kissing her in the morning
sipping tea at a café after work, nodding at strangers

reassuring them of their own wise humanity.
We hear of this and cannot help but ask
what ineffable secrets lurk beneath our cordial veneers,
shudder at the thought of what monsters

we may have flirtatiously grinned at.
So our heart adds one more defensive layer
while we realize we don’t ever really know anyone,
asking in our own muddled, churning depths

what horrors we ourselves might be capable of burying
beneath the sediments of our civilized rituals