punkadixon

The Same Troubles with Beauty You've Always Had

I still get the occasional snapshot in letters
crowded with bad news and rage and futile self-
aggrandizement, pictures of you in London or Belgium
or Corfu, depending on what man you're with taking you where,
or small-town modeling for hair salons or Florida
clothes stores, and I can see you're still someone whose
beauty is exercised like the bully on
the playground, to triumph in small, pointless ways,
and you've always been indisputably beautiful,
silencing every room you've ever walked into,
your lips pursed and carefully painted, your neck craned
upward in its fullest swannish arc. Apparently
you're having the same troubles with beauty you've always had,
men buying you plane tickets to Europe and after
a few weeks wishing you'd leave. How many strikes
have you taken, how many semi-rapes by boyfriends
with less patience for you than for the busy bartender?
How many times have you told me one of them had spread your legs
as you're sleeping, trying not to wake you?
How many abortions now? I remember the second,
which I drove you to, though it certainly wasn't my child,
and, with the clinic's appointments doubled up,
what should've taken hours took all day, every waiting seat
taken by the young girls and their mothers, their faces
like cliffsides, sitting silently in twos, each sinner
beside her own avenging angel. You even hushed them,
walking in like a diva to the cast party.
By never taking me to bed, you preserved me
for situations like this, the only friend you had left.
Every few hours I'd leave and call whom I was seeing then and
lie to her one of my famous white lies, told
with head held high, confident in its kindness.
Five hours later you were summoned, and I sat alone
with the two generations of women, reading
pamphlets. You stumbled coming out, and I drove you
not home, but to the empty house of your lover, a Turk
who claimed never to ejaculate and had his eye
on the 14-year-old boy next door. You sat on his couch
and cried, and I did what could be called my work or his,
I held you to my chest, to my heart. You've been thanking
me ever since, though the letters have trickled to maybe one
a year, and the photos you favor were taken years ago.
Unfocused that day, I remember the clinic
perhaps better than you, the thin, teary teenage girls
looking down at their laps unsure of what to fear more,
the surgery or their mothers, and hatred filling
the sometimes attractive, mothery faces
of the mothers like blood filling the nose of a drunk,
hatred for men, for children, for shame and weeping
and hatred, and as I watched all day long, each unfurled
old tissues from their sweater pockets and purses
and passed them with silent understanding to their children.

~Michael Atkinson