Token, Jennifer Packer
a line in there after my wife's translation of Frank Stanford run through a foreign language translator three or four times
Looking up the word “Token” in the dictionary we find several meanings that might apply.
Token, a small part representing a whole, as a head may represent the rest of the body.
Token, an outward sign or expression, a symbol, as colors might be symbolic, here yellows, purples, browns and reds, or as sleep, or the act of painting, in which many disparate shapes are united, might be, or even in the way a person may stand in for other people or perhaps just for the qualities of our emotions, and thus the one depicted is at once himself and more than himself, a place where light is let into other bodies.
Token, a distinguishing feature. Perhaps here the way the head’s dominant colors are reds and purples more than the browns which we associate with the color of skin, as if the painter painted a head with colors of the human heart.
Token, as a keepsake, a painting that preserves his memory. In order to make secure the things we’ve seen. I think not of the painting but of my grandfather’s face. I am glad I can remember it and hope I’ll do so still for a long time, but when I finally forget what he looks like, nothing will replace what I have lost.
Token, a thing servicing as a visible or tangible representation of a fact, quality, feeling. I think of the whiteness that cuts the painting in half, its shape looking like a sheet that covers the body below the collarbones, one of which juts out, the other one, the left one, given shape by a small red line that bends the aperture of the sheet, which is not quite white there, some of the colors from above bleeding down into that bright thing below. I think of that yellow where his head lay, bright but not the way light is, more like a sweater or bit of cloth life has left its smell. I think the way the eyes are shut. I think of the eyes of a human being we do not see, and he is so beautiful it might surprise us as being sad for no particular reason might. In that moment your pain will be as that of a total stranger. And if you look outside, beyond the window, you don’t have to imagine the dead streetlights hanging like heavy silver moths of water. Nor the tall weeds growing on the curb strips of nearby streets. Nor the moon, the moon we cannot see, the brittle, autumn moon that travels only behind clouds, the ashen moon that passes through thin twigs and almost colors branches, the invisible moon, dragging the nets of his silence.