Nose

I am trying on an especially evil-looking pair of shoes

when the shopgirl points to the middle of her face and says,

“This is called what?” For a moment I draw a blank as I search

my mind for the Italian word for snoot, schnozzola, beak,

but when “il naso” finally surfaces, I realize

that she is Italian and probably knows the Italian word

for nose, so what she wants is the English,

which is relatively easy for me, so I say, “Nose.”

“Nose,” she replies, smiling. “You have a beautiful nose.”

I am looking at the shoes on my feet. I have dangerous feet,

especially in these particular shoes, but my nose

is rather white bread, too much like my skinflint grandmother's

for me to ever be entirely ecstatic about it,

and this girl's is spectacular, an aquiline viaduct

spanning the interval from her eyes to her delicious lips.

A friend once told me, “My sister paid $2,000

for a nose like yours, a perfect shiksa nose,

but it ending up looking like Bob Hope's.”

Suddenly, I feel as if I have no nose, like Gogol's Kovelev

riding around St. Petersburg looking for his proboscis.

What is a nose? Obviously not simply a smeller, sniffer,

or a mere searcher out of olfactory sensation,

but something more—an aesthetic appendage to the facial

construction, a slope from brow to philtrum,

with symmetrical phalanges. Aren't I precise, who knows

nothing about having an unsatisfactory nose, or ever thinking

about it for one second? Perhaps my offending part

is somewhere else, or am I as hapless as Gogol's hero—

with too little nose for my purposes, like Miss Ruby Diamond,

the richest woman in my town, who lost her nose to cancer,

and had two counterfeits, one lifelike and the other

a simple plastic flap to hide the scar of ninety years.

A nose is a nose is a nose is a nose,

Gertrude Stein did not say and why would she

as it is obviously untrue? Though each nose is an island

in the sea of the face, sticking out in a more or less

inadequate fashion. Like Cyrano, I marshal my couplets,

ragtag though they be, to celebrate all noses unloved,

those lost to disease or, like Kovelev's, inadvertently

misplaced, and the nose of the shopgirl on the Via Roma

in Firenze, her eyes red from either smoking pot or heartbreak

and the many other indignities gathered like humps on our backs,

which we touch for luck, as if floods, bombings, murders

could only happen to others who are beautiful and pure.