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Albert Goldbarth
Hair Pieces
The four-year-old is sleeping
in the field, and a butterfly
—a monarch, one of those living
stained glass windows the color of
tangerines flambé—is somehow snagged
at the tip of a tendril of her hair. There
will be minor operatics in a second,
as the insect’s struggle wakes her, and
her startle turns what might have been delight
at this to something more like momentary
terror’s arm-jacking, passionate shrieks...but
first there’s this still scene where she’s
asleep, the day’s as lucid as a day
engraved on glass, and the butterfly
hovers as if her imagination
just gave rise to an actual kite.
That’s a pretty image. So is
Leonardo’s angel, in the first work that we know
from his apprenticeship: the kneeling one,
with the luminous face and tumbling,
richly cataracted hair down past the nape.
Unearthly—that’s what he’s
a signifier of, this being who’s literally
beyond the laws of gravity and death.
All light; all ether. Even so,
of course, his halo is the standard fifteenth-century
depiction, solid, brassy,
like a drummer’s cymbal
waiting to be struck, to ching
a ripple through the reefered cellar air.
With that metallic headgear, maybe
even an angel sweats; maybe even an angel
knows how toil wrings its unmistakable
odor out of the body. Is that the point?
—an angel of empathy, who understands
a little of us when looking down
at the late-night shift. It’s 3 A.M.
A footsore diner waitress at the window
runs her hands through her hair.
The cops are on their way.
They said they’ll be here, don’t touch anything.
By “here” I mean this alley in back
of Five-Star Open All Nite Diner. Here,
where the cadaver of a crackho’ is
still warm and pliant, it’s that soon after
(Rita, the waitress, only dialed 9-1-1 a minute ago).
Before they arrive with their yellow barrier tape,
let’s look, let’s really look, at this
abandoned sixteen-year-old girlie-girl, who started out
the evening in her bead dress with the thigh slits
and her good come-do-me boots, intending
eyeball-popping style, even
something in the way of fashion self-esteem
...and now she’s just an awkward jut
of slut perfume and fear-shit. What immense
aesthetic distance would it take to see what looks
like a gardenia in her hair (a bit of sweet,
exotic flair) as something beautiful?—when what
it is, is a gob of her brains
and bloodstuff, where already the flies
are wandering, are laying their eggs
in her mazes of dream and thinking.
And the last thing on her mind?
—she was remembering
when she was four, and waking in a field...
she’d return there, if she could.
And so would we; in fact, I’m giving us
approval for exactly that. Why not
take our advantage of a few, brief lines
of respite? So it’s spring. The light
seems never to have touched a painful thing.
And in her minaret of hair: the orange
flutter of a muezzin’s robes...
he’s calling us to worship
the moment, fleeting though it is.
ALBERT GOLDBARTH lives in Wichita, “The Gateway to Boredom,”
Kansas. His most recent book, Saving Lives: Poems (Ohio State
University Press, 2001), won the National Book Critics Circle Award
in 2002, making him the only poet to win the award twice. His latest
book, Combinations of the Universe, is forthcoming from Ohio
State University Press in spring 2003 and will include some poems previously
published in The Gettysburg Review.
“Hair Pieces” appears in our Summer 2002 issue.
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