She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems (16 page)

PARNESHIA JONES

Saturday afternoon, Marshall Fields, 2nd floor, women's lingerie please.

At sixteen I am a jeans and t-shirt wearing tomboy who can think of

a few million more places to be instead of in the department store

with my mother bra shopping.

Still growing accustomed to these two new welts

lashed on to me by puberty, getting bigger by the moment,

mother looks at me and says:

While we're here, we'll get some new (larger) shirts for you too.

I resent her for taking me away from baseball fields,

horse play, and riding my bike.

We enter into no man's, and I mean no man in sight land

where women fuss and shop all day for undergarments;

the lingerie department is a world of frilly lace, night gowns,

grandma panties and support everything.

Mama takes me over to a wall covered with hundreds of white bras,

some with lace and little frills or doilies like party favors,

as if undergarments are a cause for celebration.

A few have these dainty ditsy bows in the middle.

That's a nice accent don't you think?
Mama would say.
Isn't that cute?

Like this miniature bow in the middle will take

some of the attention away from what is really going on.

When mama and I go brassiere shopping it never fails:

a short woman with an accent and glasses

attached to a chain around her neck who cares

way too much about undergarments comes up to us.

May I help you, dearies?

The bra woman assists my mother in finding the perfect bra

to as my mother put it,
hold me in the proper way. No bouncing please.

Working as a team plotting to ruin my entire day

with the bra fitting marathon, they conspire up about ten bras

in each hand which equal forty. Who's making all these bras I want to ask.

What size is she?
The bra woman asks.

You want something that will support them honey
, looking at me with a wink.

My mother looks straight at my chest.
Oh she's good size. She's out of that

training bra phase. I want her to have something that will hold them up proper.

Them, them, them they say.

Like they're two midgets I keep strapped to my chest.

The whole time I stand there while these two women one my own kin,

discuss the maintenance and storage of my two dependents.

The worst is yet to come, the dressing room.

I hate the damn dressing room, the mirrors waiting to laugh at me,

women running in and out half-naked with things showing

that I didn't even see on my own body.

I stand there half-naked and pissed. Mama on one side,

the bra woman on the other, I feel like a rag doll under interrogation

as they begin fixing straps, poking me, raising me up, snapping the back,

underwire digging my breasts a grave.

The bras clamp down onto me, shaping my breasts out to pristine bullets,

with no movement, no pulse, no life, just sitting fix up

like my mother wanted
real proper.

I will never forgive my mother for this, I keep thinking to myself.

Looking blank face at my reflection I started thinking about how my brothers

never have to shop for undergarments, why couldn't I have been born a boy?

I hate undergarments.

Mama looks at my face.
Don't you like any of them?

No, I say. Mama I hate this, please can we go?

Then she goes into her lecture on becoming a woman

and being responsible for woman upkeep.

After we are halfway through the inventory

mama looks at me wasting away in a sea of bras and takes pity on me.

All right, I think we have enough to last you for a while. Let's check out.

I don't get happy too quick 'cause I know that bra woman

still lurks about and if she senses my excitement that we are leaving

she will come with more white bras.

We make our way to the check out counter

and the bra woman rings us up.

Oh honey you picked out some beautiful bras
, she says.

Just remember hand wash.
How about bury, I want to ask.

She and my mother talk about how they are just right

and will do the trick for me with no bouncing at all.

MARY OLIVER

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

DENISE LEVERTOV

The fire in leaf and grass

so green it seems

each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves

shivering in the sun,

each day the last day.

A red salamander

so cold and so

easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet

and long tail. I hold

my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

EMILY DICKINSON

I stepped from plank to plank,

A slow and cautious way;

The stars about my head I felt,

About my feet the sea.

I knew not but the next

Would be my final inch.

This gave me that precarious gait

Some call experience.

LUCILLE CLIFTON

well girl, goodbye,

after thirty-eight years.

thirty-eight years and you

never arrived

splendid in your red dress

without trouble for me

somewhere, somehow.

now it is done,

and i feel just like

the grandmothers who,

after the hussy has gone,

sit holding her photograph

and sighing,
wasn't she

beautiful? wasn't she beautiful?

LUCILLE CLIFTON

all night i dream of lips

that nursed and nursed

and the lonely nipple

lost in loss and the need

to feed that turns at last

on itself        that will kill

its body for its hunger's sake

all night i hear the whispering

the soft

love calls you to this knife

for love    for love

all night it is the one breast

comforting the other

JOYCE SUTPHEN

I feel older, younger, both

at once. Every time I win,

I lose. Every time I count,

I forget and must begin again.

I must begin again, and again I

must begin. Every time I lose,

I win and must begin again.

Everything I plan must wait, and

having to wait has made me old, and

the older I get, the more I wait, and everything

I'm waiting for has already been planned.

I feel sadder, wiser, neither

together. Everything is almost

true, and almost true is everywhere.

I feel sadder, wiser, neither at once.

I end in beginning, in ending I find

that beginning is the first thing to do.

I stop when I start, but my heart keeps on beating,

so I must go on starting in spite of the stopping.

I must stop my stopping and start to start—

I can end at the beginning or begin at the end.

I feel older, younger, both at once.

ROGER McGOUGH

Everyday

I think about dying.

About disease, starvation,

violence, terrorism, war,

the end of the world.

It helps

keep my mind off things.

BARBARA RAS

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger

on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look

of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite

every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,

you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,

though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam

that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys

until you realize foam's twin is blood.

You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,

so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,

glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,

never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you

all roads narrow at the border.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,

and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave

where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,

but you can have the words
forgive
and
forget
hold hands

as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful

for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful

for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels

sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,

for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,

the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,

at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping

of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd

but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,

how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,

until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,

and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind

as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,

you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond

of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas

your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.

There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,

it will always whisper, you can't have it all,

but there is this.

MARGE PIERCY

The first white hair coils in my hand,

more wire than down.

Out of the bathroom mirror it glittered at me.

I plucked it, feeling thirty creep in my joints,

and found it silver. It does not melt.

My twentieth birthday lean as glass

spring vacation I stayed in the college town

twanging misery's electric banjo offkey.

I wanted to inject love right into the veins

of my thigh and wake up visible:

to vibrate color

like the minerals in stones under black light.

My best friend went home without loaning me money.

Hunger was all of the time the taste of my mouth.

Now I am ripened and sag a little from my spine.

More than most I have been the same ragged self

in all colors of luck dripping and dry,

yet love has nested in me and gradually eaten

those sense organs I used to feel with.

I have eaten my hunger soft and my ghost grows stronger.

Gradually, I am turning to chalk,

to humus, to pages and pages of paper,

to fine silver wire like something a violin

could be strung with, or somebody garroted,

or current run through: silver truly,

this hair, shiny and purposeful as forceps

if I knew how to use it.

ANNA SWIR

She is sixty. She lives

the greatest love of her life.

She walks arm-in-arm with her dear one,

her hair streams in the wind.

Her dear one says:

“You have hair like pearls.”

Her children say:

“Old fool.”

MARY URSULA BETHELL

“Established” is a good word, much used in garden books,

“The plant, when established” . . .

Oh, become established quickly, quickly, garden!

For I am fugitive, I am very fugitive—

Those that come after me will gather these roses,

And watch, as I do now, the white wistaria

Burst, in the sunshine, from its pale green sheath.

Planned. Planted. Established. Then neglected,

Till at last the loiterer by the gate will wonder

At the old, old cottage, the old wooden cottage,

And say, “One might build here, the view is glorious;

This must have been a pretty garden once.”