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"i don't think this next poem needs any introduction-- it's best to let the words speak for themselves"- Billy Collins, in his poem, "The Introduction."

7.05.2012

The Haircut 

My dad always told me
that when he was 16,
he loved, like he has never loved,
a woman named Evie,
a woman with hair long like mine.

It swung
down to my skinny hips
like the roots of the banyan trees
I hung from,
wild.

My hair was never pretty,
never silky,
in spite of the gobs of pantene pro-v i coaxed into it with a wide-toothed comb
in the shower,
pulling out hurricanes of hair in the lather.
I'd smear them onto the tiled wall
into delicate abstractions of spirals and hearts.
They hung on,
like silly wishes,
in the foggy shampooed air.

I'd chew on it when I was thinking,
so it always smelled
like sweat & dirt & spit,
the mildew that settles into the earth,
after the florida rains.

The humidity,
or perhaps my nature,
made it frizz out from my scalp
in tiny half-spirals,
trails of the thoughts I could never contain,
ascending
away from me
just 
     out of reach.

My hair was a dream, darkly knotted.

And Evie was a dirty fairytale,
pretty & feminine & good.
And Oh, the sex!
And Oh, that hair!

I always reminded him of her.

At 16, the haircut was my first real betrayal.
My mother, his silent challenger, took me to the beauty parlor,
where a blonde face,
fresh out of beauty school,
quivered at the chance to transform me.

I learned
it had been dead for a long time,
all that hair.
That was why it never shined.
It was too long to thrive,
a self-defeat. 

Always posessing a bit more than intuition,
maybe he knew
the haircut was just
one shoulder-length layered look
closer to dyke.
Maybe he could see the sped-up film
of the years before us,
my hair growing shorter and shorter,
hacked at with kitchen scissors,
bobbed as I worked summer jobs at the mall,
until a straight-edge razor
in a shack
in a village
in India
rendered me balder
than the moment
I first
fell into his hands
in the hospital,
cold.

I shivered when my bare head brushed against the mosquito net in bed each night, 
against the grain, 
But being seen as a boy
on the streets each day
                                 was escape.

Maybe he knew,
because when I cut my hair at 16,
my father yelled at me
until I cried,
the guilt of failed girlhood pouring out of me,
a draining wound.

Some people have nightmares about being naked in high school. 
But I anxiously dream
that my hair betrays me,
grows girl-long again minutes after I cut it,
as suddenly uncontrollable as my lilting thoughts.

I am helpless and desperate,
the scissors shaking in my hands
in the mirror of my girlhood bathroom,
while my father, in the next room,
impatient,
calls out for me--

my old name.
heard Ana @ 12:36 AM