Make believe generally has no rules except to stay in character.
—Wikipedia
The first time I took a razor to my face
I forgot what I was made of. Having
made believe all I could, I made believe
a little further, pulling the open blade
around the corner of my lips, watching
a few desolate strands fall to the sink
like soldiers in a porcelain trench,
or as with invisible ink drew myself
a mustache I could get behind.
Or I am made up of fanciful scraps
and small fingers, one for every time
I’ve ever been called Sir.
Tomorrow I’ll get a prescription
is what I’ve resolved every day since
the last June solstice drained the light
from the sky and passerines remembered
they had wings. In the woods I walk
figure eights around ground shrubs
that cling to the cold grass below
and remind myself: no guarantees.
It’s true, some days I want the beard
in writing, want to know that when
I needle myself every fourteen
days, all the hundred jagged things
that give me away will start to shift
and this traveling itch will disappear
for good. But it happens as a gradient
so I wait like small hands cupped. I wait
in character, hips pointing the way,
shoulders broad like a wingspan.
I wait at the outskirts of regulation
with my Stetson and Wranglers for
the oak trees and the sheep herd
and the waiter and the goat vet
and the teapot and the snowstorm
and my father and my father’s father
and the children I pass in the field
to see me as this new soft man
and for me to begin to believe it.
Oliver Bendorf is the author of The Spectral Wilderness, selected by Mark Doty for the 2013 Wick Poetry Prize and forthcoming from Kent State University Press. Other poems of his are forthcoming in Barn Owl Review, Blackbird, and jubilat. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.