Shaved Reflections

The razor plows through the beard

like a snowblade scraping winter from a forgotten road,

 leaving pale skin exposed in its wake.

Gray stubble falls into the basin

like iron filings shaken from an aging machine.

Each stroke uncovers another small truth:

a wrinkle etched beside the mouth

like a dry creek finding deeper channels,

eyes either clear as rinsed glass or

red as weather-beaten apples left too long on the branch,

a hairline retreating inch by inch

like a nervous army abandoning a border,

sideburns thinning into memory.

The mirror keeps no secrets.

It strips the face the way tidewater strips seaweed from stone.

As the lather disappears, other sediments rise.

There is the unpaid invoice hiding beneath one cheek,

the strained conversation with a spouse lodged beneath the chin,

the child who no longer needs guidance

standing silently in the corners of the eyes.

Deadlines cling to the jawline like burrs on a wool coat.

Mortgage payments,

aging parents,

unfinished promises,

all emerge through the steam

like wrecks surfacing from a fogbound harbor.

His face becomes a topographical map of every worry he has carried,

and the razor follows each contour

as though tracing fault lines before an earthquake.

At last he stands clean-shaven,

the beard gone,

peach fuzz a species extinct decades ago.

The naked face stares back, startling in its honesty.

Each morning seems to reveal how swiftly flesh alters,

how thoughts weather,

how certainty molts its skin overnight.

The face cannot lie; it records everything.

Then the vision vanishes.  Only the present face remains.

The final revelation arrives not in the wrinkles,

not in the receding hair,

not in the red-rimmed eyes.

Looking into the mirror,

he suddenly understands the mirror has never been showing
what time has taken from him.

It has been quietly displaying
how much of him survived.