She never knew I was there, 
my twelve-year-old self, peering 
through the kitchen window
out to the porch-turned-sunroom,
watching my mother. 
There in housedress and apron 
she sat on the footstool near the old hi-fi,
transfixed by “Clair de Lune”—
each piano note rising from the spinning vinyl 
like an iridescent bubble into the long-leaf pines.
 
The comfortable voices: Perry Como, Peggy Lee, 
Tennessee Ernie Ford—our house breathed 
these with ease, 
but here was daring Debussy, stilling my mother 
in the middle of her housework, 
rare as a resting bee in the spring orchard. 
 
The memory is evergreen to this day 
each time I hear the piece—
for at that moment,
my mother became      someone I’d never met, 
transplanted city girl dreaming something 
I couldn’t imagine, staring at the tall pines, 
their needles flashing brilliance 
as they scratched the Alabama sky.

I own a face familiar; others know me
when they don’t. Entering the crowded plane
or busy shop, I see the glance unguarded
 
that stops and squints, the double take
quick-shifting into the studied stare  
at nothing there, just far away from me.
 
Eyes of muddled green, skin equivocating beige
that changes with the hour and the light (imagine
cliffs of clay), nose with ethnic implication.
 
“You look familiar…” they say, moist hand in mine
to handshake memory, or, “I think we may have met before…”
or, “Don’t I know you, dear?” I have that kind of face.
 
So that day in the Burmese market, the stares at first
meant nothing. Left to take my hundred shots, to freeze
hot time into framed submission, turning to include
 
all views—the silks, the gourds, the heads piled high
with big-leafed greens, the tight displays of fruit, the cart
across the square, ox-drawn mountain of melons, children
 
dancing by its side, and the women’s clay-brushed faces,
their dignity and grace, the skirted men, surprising in appeal,
and the riveting red of the monks’ rough garments, 
 
the golden Buddha carvings—I snapped all these
in tourist hunger, letting brown-eyed stares ricochet
from my camera lens and dusty skin. Until
 
I saw that day what they were seeing. Yellow-haired
and towering presence, dressed in lycra slacks, 
large tote swinging, camera clicking, glossy lipstick
 
(coveted and rare) beaming bright beneath the viewer,
I was for them in the world that spawned them,
the only subject exotic, the one face unfamiliar.