I. Isolation of Beautiful Women
“How were you able to get ten of the world’s
most beautiful women to marry you?”
“I just asked them. You know, men all over
the world dream about Lana Turner, desire
her, want to be with her. But very very
few ever ask her to marry them.”
— PARAPHRASE OF AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTIE SHAW
We are burning
in our heads
at night,
bonfires of our own bodies.
Persia reduces our heads
to star sapphires and lapis lazuli.
Silver threads itself
into the lines of our throats
and glitters every time we speak.
Old alchemical riddles
are solved in the dreams of men
who marry other women and think of us.
Anyone who sees us
will hold our small hands,
like mirrors in which they see themselves,
and try to initial our arms
with desperation.
Everyone wants to come close to
the cinnamon of our ears.
Every man wants to explore our bodies
and fill up our minds.
Riding their motorcycles along collapsing grey highways,
they sequester their ambivalent hunting clothes
between our legs,
reminding themselves of their value
by quoting mining stock prices, and ours.
But men do not marry us,
do not ask us to share their lives,
do not survive the bonfires
hot enough to melt steel.
To alchemize rubies.
We live the loneliness
that men run after,
and we,
the precious rocks of the earth
are made harder,
more fiery
more beautiful,
more complex,
by all the pressing,
the burying,
the plundering;
even your desertions,
your betrayals,
your failure to understand and love us,
your unwillingness to face the world
as staunchly as we do;
these things
which ravage us,
cannot destroy our lives,
though they often take our bodies.
We are the earth.
We wake up
finding ourselves
glinting in the dark
after thousands of years
of pressing.
II. Movement to Establish My Identity
I know what wages beauty gives,
How hard a life her servant lives…
— “To A Young Beauty,” W.B. YEATS
A woman wakes up
finds herself
glinting in the dark;
the earth holds her
as a precious rock
in a mine
her breath is a jumble
of sediments,
of mixed strata,
of the valuable,
beautiful,
of bulk.
All men are miners;
willing to work hard
and cover themselves with pit dirt;
to dig out;
to weigh;
to possess.
Mine is a place.
Mine is a designation.
A man says, “it is mine,:
but he hacks,
chops apart the mine
to discover,
to plunder,
what’s in it / Plunder,
that is the word.
Plunder.
A woman wakes up
finds herself
scarred
but still glinting
in the dark.
III. Beauty
only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.
—“For Anne Gregory,” W.B. YEATS
and if I cut off my long hair,
if I stopped speaking,
if I stopped dreaming for other people about parts of the car,
stopped handing them tall creamy flowered silks
and loosing the magnificent hawks to fly in their direction,
stopped exciting them with the possibilities
of a thousand crystals under the fingernail
to look at while writing a letter,
if I stopped crying for the salvation of the tea ceremony,
stopped rushing in excitedly with a spikey bird-of-paradise,
and never let them see how accurate my pistol shooting is,
who would I be?
Where is the real me
I want them all to love?
We are all the textures we wear.
We frighten men with our steel;
we fascinate them with our silk;
we seduce them with our cinnamon;
we rule them with our sensuous voices;
we confuse them with our submissions.
Is there anywhere
a man
who
will not punish us
for our beauty?
He is the one
we all search for,
chanting names for exotic oceans of the moon.
He is the one
we all anticipate,
pretending these small pedestrians
jaywalking into our lives
are he.
He is the one
we all anticipate;
beauty looks for its match,
confuses the issue
with a mystery that does not exist:
the rock
that cannot burn.
We are burning
in our heads at night
the incense of our histories, finding
you have used our skulls
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