Poetry of Diane Seuss
hair is swollen, it’s Mississippian,
sucking the breath
out of freckle-faced runaways, those boys on their rafts riding the rapids
of my midlife crisis. Curls curl, the girls
beat laundry on my thrumming temple. My zillion
locks are the leashes of bloodhounds on the trail of an escapee, but
there is no escaping my hair. My
mane holds more tears than water tower or civil war. It’s dammed up with drowned
and cannonballs. It’s bigger than the cinderblock church, more incoherent than speaking
more desperate than salvation, more pathetic than being born again. God is a bone-
handled brush that can’t
untangle my hair. When I was young I liked to rock my soul, back
and forth, and bash my skull against the headboard. Hoo
said she saw in Reader’s Digest
that’s a sign of crazy so I did it some more, I did it harder until
I hairline fractured. I grabbed flagpoles
during storms and when lightning struck I smelled the saintly perfume of burning
I chided boys until they pressed their guns to my tresses and squeezed the triggers.
I was mascaraed and massacred.
I rose again, dancing on my own coffin like an assassinated
president, shaking my waist-length hair. Women across the
land send glittered sympathy cards about
the tragic fate of my hair. Who would covet, would hanker after, my twisted coif?
the ones biting down hard on the rubber bits in their mouths, their hair cascading from
madhouse windows. The harebrained,
drinking and drawing at the flung-back throat of love.
pants are disintegrating. Yes,
my bright pink pants. Bright pink, black tiger
stripes. The pants on which I built my new life.
I’m known for. Foundational. Infamous.
In one day, holes. Old hungers, yawning griefs.
Split incisions. Indecisions. Those pants, sunset
striping the sky. The pink so domestic,
like girl-curtains, a canopy bed. The black
so inkish, so woman writer, so Cleopatra’s
mascara. The pink
so Sappho’s vaginal whorl,
so Of Woman Born. The black so Era of Poetess
Suicides. So Tia Maria and Seconals. It was all
balanced, so joyous, so pitifully bifurcated,
naively bi-curious, so woozy, sleazy, back before
my pants acted all napalmed, all flesh-eating
sloughed-off aesthetic, all glory holed.
That woman, that
woman with the rat’s
nest hair whose donuts I refused
to eat, that woman with the sick kitten smile,
teeth, goose fat gums, her
big breasts making drag-trails
in the powdered sugar like a dead body pulled
that woman whose milk I would
not drink because of the brown
ring around the circumference of the glass,
her scalp with the long,
curled fingernails of a corpse
and then picked up a donut, her hand delving
into the black
mesh of hair and reaching
into the glass case to grab a long
john, her sickle-shaped eyes, the broken capillaries
cheeks like the map of unnamed
rivers that hung in the back
of the barber shop, that Bertha, that Thelma,
Pearl stuck away in a cement
block building that used to be
the tabernacle for crazies, that woman, filthy
oracle, hand mirror.
long time I thought everything
was a drag. Going to the store was a drag.
Storehouse was a drag. Storage bin was
drag with its pile of buffalo head nickels.
Storage locker where we kept the shucked
off stories was a drag, and
the funeral coat,
and the stack of cast-off fedoras. Hair
back then was a drag, dragging a comb
through its nests
and cesspools. Seemed
like all there was to do on a Saturday night
was to drag that hook through slow brown
trying to snag my own lost girl.