My second oldest daughter, looking like
A wide-eyed pubescent Joan Didion,
Might stare for a minute or two and take
Her measure in a mirror, not in vain
But, fearing any other referent,
To wait and see if mind can correspond
With will, observe the fierce intransigent
Expression staring back, and note the bland
Details parading back and forth behind
Her thoughts – Homer’s catalog of ships
Revised as fashion plates and redefined
As strutting models where flashbulbs eclipse
The Aegean dawn igniting in her eyes…
So candid-cool, so psychological,
Her pert reserve, a warning to the wise –
She’s pretty, sane, sixteen, no sort of fool:
One hand, its fingers splayed (sans cigarette)
In limp salute, the other curls around
Her girlish hips. She cocks her head to set
Her ear a few degrees beyond each sound
It detonates: a rapt applause confused
With surf’s tumult – the torch song’s eclipse
Of battle armor rattling in the dust –
The singing rigging of a thousand ships.
Great, thanks.
You captured her ferocity perfectly….
Nice work, Mr JOB, as always … I especially like the lines re: double meaning of catalog, am flailing a bit with the word “psychological” (though I like that as well), and … that is one helluva a picture.
I don’t know if I can help with “psychological” – other than to say that’s always been part of Bernadette’s character. She’s a Percy character, or a Dostoevsky character, or a Dickens character in that way, I guess.
Here’s another, older poem where she shows up – yes, I stole with impunity from myself:
How My Children See Me
I wonder this like a coin or playing card standing up on its edge.
Darkness draws near as my wonder wades the shallows of sleep. Its current
Carries me from my barren bedroom over night, into its deepest
Regions, where I am too far out to recall bumped furniture’s sudden
Sharp report across the floor, or a soft whimper that expresses
Tired and cold – after the woodstove dies down and windows frost up,
Like living manna, the little ones grow around us, three draped between us,
One on the pullout, another curled like spaniel or setter at the wide foot
Of the wide bed.
It is the same when I go away for awhile. I will hold
Myself at an arm’s length of mind, cock-eyed, like someone vain trying
To shoot himself with a camera:
The boy, I wonder, should see himself
In me, but probably doesn’t or can’t now that he is caught up in the time
Of too much a boy to see what manhood promises for him one day.
My oldest, she sees in me a faithless hero whom she has willed to love
The whole of – even the grumpiness which will grow like whiskers
At the short end of every day.
My middle one is fierce and psychological
All at once; she sees through convenient sibling alliances as tests of will
Chalked up, tallied up and, with a hug for her old man, put up with.
The tow-headed two-year-old stands against her own grand confusion
With sky-blue eyes rimmed a teary red, two being the age of terrible things
Like bones breaking out of their own infancy.
She sees me in violet tears.
And the youngest only gurgles his milky morning song in bed beside you;
He is considerate, though, smiling through yawns at the pre-dawn light.
I reach to kiss you farewell. His nubby fingers fumble for me, clinging to see.
Yowza … isn’t the tow-head the same as the one doing good work in Peru?
And “like someone vain trying / To shoot himself with a camera” … how prescient!
Nice work … although “barren bedroom” doesn’t seem to have made much more sense then than in years hence.
No, the tow head is a daughter – oldest son was never a tow head from my remembering.
Re: barren bedroom – you’re right, it never was barren… – I think I just let myself get drunk with the alliteration is all.
thanks!
JOB