Trinkets

I changed my hair today. Most of it, gone…dyed dark, beautifully trimmed, un-demure. 1920s?

My neck divulged, as it was when we met, in July. I wore a pink chiffon skirt that you shoved against a tree. your face grazed every fresh shorn tendril of once-hair: I hear

A gasp! as diaphanous fibers fray, then split. A playful thrill, that blush veil, in two. My chilled spine struck against the twilit bark.

— — -

Does this brevity excite you?

Because I love what feels this

bright and exposed,

smeared in sun and sex and danger.

— — -

“I’ll be your Jay Gatsby” he said as he left.

He never dared say I was Daisy….

a missing green light,

the high goddess of caprice,

gossamer and cocky.

I imagine her: the same shock of straight hair. The strand that vanished from the darkening shore

and never came back…

— —

This naked neck reminds me: Aggression/Laughter.

One of my earrings

Gone after that giddy, sensual fight.

Us — dressed up, tipsy and impulsive,

forever diving after plastic pearls…

— —

Sylvia Plath also lost an earring the first time Ted Hughes kissed her.

They write movies about people like You/Me

Fictions. Books.

Verses — — Promises,

All of them just a school-girl’s trinkets.

….

(Look at

Them collecting dust in a colossal heap —

the Lost and Found of human feeling!)

But we, too, hold a sick love for poet-fiction,

the kind that can’t resist incandescent visions of Again!

Yet, again, I walk into winter, a new-grown skein tosses silk over my shoulders.

With another gusty lash

— Gleeful, those pieces tear away,

whistling

cut so deeply by the lacerated dusk.

The once-warm is now shaken open and cold as

My barren ears grow numb from

sealing out imploring chasms —

wishing and wandering without ever truly hoping.

Here we are, wondering at what is dark

and what is gone

{and is it Gone?}

I know the cold will sting my bare skin,

For months, asking:

Will this loss, too, be merely cosmetic?