LAUREL BLOSSOM

LOUISE GLUCK'S HAIR

If I keep your cuttings from the salon floor.
      If they burn, if I breathe their bones and smoke.
            If I wind them in my pubic hair.

If I weave with them an inheritable cloak.
      If I glue them to the scalp of voodoo Barbie.
            If that’s not a stroke

Of genius. If I compare them to a summer’s day.
      If I finger them like coins in my copper pocket.
            If they bring me luck. If in the fair reliquary

Of their art, they break into lines, if they catch the light.
      If I analyze their exact genetic composition.
            If I count their feet.

If theirs is the logic of life’s condition:
      I.e., if split ends, what split beginnings.
            From black roots, what brittle, bleached conclusion.

If I master the syntax of sweepings.
      If, in a meadow, I let the sky take them.
            If it plays them like strings.

If they whiten with time.
      In winter, if they crystallize
            When wet. If they rhyme.

In their disappearing ink, if I revise and revise.
      If when I occupy the barber’s chair.
            If words like lockets save our brunettish lives.
 

CUT SHORT

Next I’ll have it stripped and dyed
      turquoise, like that girl at the Tate,
            her whole head a halo, glowing.

My daughter says as long as I don’t look like a guy.
      I promise big earrings, plenty of make-up.
            I’m 52 and 1/3, going on 53,

when my mother died. I tell my friends
      to look out for me, I might step in front of a truck.
            You’re not supposed to outlast your own mother

the first time, let alone twice.
      She killed herself by mistake. It was a natural
            reaction, getting my hair cut

short, like a nun
      or Joan of Arc, her all-time favorite, a disguise
            to slip between enemy lines

my unacknowledged dream of freedom. I’m afraid
      I’m giving up my femininity
            for nothing. Bob-headed Carrington

shot herself at 38. She said oh,
      to have the ambition of Tintoretto and to paint
            like a diseased dormouse. My friend Marion

says not to worry,
      my hair will grow long in the grave
            when all of us will be the same age.

LAUREL BLOSSOM’s most recent book of poetry is The Papers Said (Greenhouse Review Press, 1993). Earlier books include What’s Wrong (Cobham & Hatherton Press, 1987) and Any Minute (Greenhouse Review Press, 1979). Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, and in national journals including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Pequod, The Paris Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Deadsnake Apotheosis, Many Mountains Moving, among others. Her work has been nominated both for the Pushcart Prize and the Elliston Prize. She has recently completed a book-length poem, Degrees of Latitude, the first in a projected trilogy exploring a woman’s search for her human coordinates in a difficult, multi-dimensional world.

Blossom is the editor of Splash! Great Writing About Swimming (Ecco Press, 1996) and Many Lights in Many Windows: Twenty Years of Great Fiction and Poetry from The Writers Community (Milkweed Editions, 1997). She has recently joined the editorial board of Heliotrope: a journal of poetry.

Blossom has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers; a scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; and a residency at Yaddo. She serves on the Board of Regents of Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, where she holds a lifetime Foundation Fellowship. She co-founded the esteemed writing residency and workshop program The Writers Community, and now serves as chair of the Writers Community Committee of the YMCA National Writer’s Voice.