|
Ode to Airheads,
Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris
For an hour on
the train from Beauvais to Paris
Nord I'm entertained
by the conversation of three
American girls about their appointment the next
day with a hairdresser,
and if there is a subtext
to this talk, I'm missing it, though little else. Will bangs
make them look too dykey?
And layers, sometimes they hang
like the fur of a shaggy dog. Streaks, what about long
streaks? "Whore," they
scream, laughing like a coven of wild
monkeys, and after they have exhausted the present
tense, they go on to the
remembrance of hairdos past--
high school proms, botched perms, late-night drunken cuts. The Loch
Ness
Monster would be lost in
their brains as in a vast, starless
sea, but they're happy, will marry, overpopulate
the Earth, which you
can't say about many poets,
I think a few weeks later taking the eighty-four
bus to the hairdresser,
where I'll spend three long hours
and leave with one of the best cuts of my life from Guy,
who has a scar on his
right cheek and is Israeli,
but before that I pass a hotel with a plaque--
Attila József, great
Hungarian poet, black
moods and penniless, lived there ten years before he threw
himself under a train in
Budapest. If we knew
what the years held, would we alter our choices, take the train
at three-twenty instead
of noon, walk in the rain
instead of taking the metro? The time travel films
I adore speak to this
very question: overwhelmed
by disease and war, the future sends Bruce Willis back
to stop a madman. I could
be waiting by the track
as József arrives in Paris, not with love but money,
which seemed to be the
missing ingredient, the honey
he needed to sweeten his tea. Most days I take the B
line of the RER, and one
of the stops is Draney,
the way station for Jews rounded up by the Nazis
before being sent in
trains to the camps, but we can't see
those black-and-white figures in the Technicolor
present like ghosts
reminding us with their pallor
how dearly our circus of reds and golds has been purchased
and how in an instant all
those colors could be erased.
Barbara Hamby,
Indiana Review and
The Best
American Poetry 2009
More Poems
Out of
the Box Coaching and
Breakthroughs with the Enneagram,
Mary R. Bast, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved. Revised:
December 04, 2011
|