Faces of Grace

Bali & Montana

[A] mystery, confined in little space 
the whole world’s wonder in a single face. 
                                     —Conrad Aiken

A white bat flies into the mango tree. 
Erratic, it darts through wet leaves 
and disappears. We are left looking 
at dangling fruit dancing over the pool. 
From the rooftop restaurant two terraces 
above, the song “White Christmas” wafts down. 
My friends start singing about sleigh bells 
as we bask in the warm morning of a foreign 
December. 
          Then a memory flits within me— 
our family’s first winter in Montana. 
My father, younger than I am now, 
pastored a small church. For the holiday, 
he rented three, hay-filled sleighs drawn 
by draft horses. My mother stuffed my brother 
and me into Moon Boots and mittens. 
With the congregation, we sang carols 
beneath a sky of stars, horses belling forth 
on glittering snow, their breath making brief 
clouds in bright moonlight. We arrived 
to a tended bonfire and hot chocolate served 
beneath ancient firs. Around the fire, all faces 
glowed orange. But when I left the circle 
to refill my cup at a table set deeper in the trees, 
everyone became a nameless shape. 
I’ve forgotten every face. 
Wham!’s 
“Last Christmas” begins, and I’m back 
at the edge of a rainforest, poolside 
beneath bougainvillea, with chicory coffee 
and my fellow teachers on winter break. 
I’m wearing a bikini I bought for a song 
in a land where you can get an hour-long 
massage for five dollars. I’ve forgotten the face 
of the woman who gave me that massage, 
though I recall the three-walled room, 
its fourth side wide open to the rice paddy 
and the palm tree reaching inside. 
I look down at the length of myself 
and hardly know the woman I see— 
a yard taller than the girl decades ago, 
bony and bundled in hay on a sleigh, 
not knowing what Bali was, let alone where— 
or where most of the world was or how 
to move through it. When I look 
at myself decades from now, 
                                                 please may I 
see a being who traced a path 
of grace on this earth. 
                                       Please may I 
have learned more 
than geography. 
                               Please may I 
remember the faces I meet 
and the lives behind them.