Beauty

When the medication she was taking

caused tiny vessels in her face to break,

leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,

my sister said she knew she would

never be beautiful again.

After all those years

of watching her reflection in the mirror,

sucking in her stomach and standing straight,

she said it was a relief,

being done with beauty,

but I could see her pause inside that moment

as the knowledge spread across her face

with a fine distress, sucking

the peach out of her lips,

making her cute nose seem, for the first time,

a little knobby.

I’m probably the only one in the whole world

who actually remembers the year in high school

she perfected the art

of being a dumb blond,

spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab,

tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill

which was her specialty,

while some football player named Johnny

with a pained expression in his eyes

wrapped his thick finger over and over again

in the bedspring of one of those pale curls.

Or how she spent the next decade of her life

auditioning a series of tall men,

looking for just one with the kind

of attention span she could count on.

Then one day her time of prettiness

was over, done, finito,

and all those other beautiful women

in the magazines and on the streets

just kept on being beautiful

everywhere you looked,

walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance

in which you sense they always seem to have one hand

touching the secret place

that keeps their beauty safe,

inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it—

It was spring. Season when the young

buttercups and daisies climb up on the

mulched bodies of their forebears

to wave their flags in the parade.

My sister just stood still for thirty seconds,

amazed by what was happening,

then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head

as if she was throwing something out,

something she had carried a long ways,

but had no use for anymore,

now that it had no use for her.

That, too, was beautiful.

Source: Donkey Gospel (1998)