DAILY REFLECTIONS ON A SMILE

Sawicki tenders hundreds of sudden, short atmospherics on the subject of lips and smiles.

Even Frank Sinatra would be hard put to rival Sawicki when it comes to thoughts on lips and all they speak of. What he offers here is a company of quick reflections—spontaneous-seeming, like brief poems—on lips and smiles and their many moods. He won’t be tied down to any one perspective; he’s all over the lower-facial map. Each musing is spare, but while some are light on their worldly feet, others are freighted with emotional baggage, little islands of attitude. Some of the headings feel a bit too Halmark-y: “Life Is Better When Your Smile Is At Your Best” or “The Only Difference Between A Smile And A Frown Is In The Way Your Heart Speaks.” The better material gives you something to chew on. They may be the haikulike utterances: “Black magic is when a smile becomes the ghost of lips,” or “Disoriented lips liberated an emerging gale of abandoned hallucinating smiles.” Others are runic: “Quivering lips lingered smiling over juicy morsels before scurrying the bits onto a sprung up wildly lashing tongue,” or “A smile that denounces its lips bears a darker shadow than three moons orbiting over a black forest.” Some have a bebop syncopation: “All a smile has to do is grab some lips with invisible jazz and go for broke,” or “Smiles act polite, consent to an encounter, kidnap lips, and watch out because dumb love will get you busted.” Some are bitter or smoky, some make strange leaps or dabble in the alchemy of a moue, others reach for the cosmic: “Bubbling smile crooned the prettiest song ever heard through pink petal lips gentler than a whispering choir of treasured angels.” There is also bitterness and anger, hellfire and brimstone: “Lips so numb with false smiles preached by a red-eyed devil on judgement Sunday.” [sic] Fleet grazings upon the mouth, by turns cerebral, then sensuous.