It Follows

If you had a lot of money

(by some coincidence

you’re at the Nassau Inn in Princeton

getting a whiff of class)

and you just noticed two days ago

that your face has fallen,

but you don’t believe it,

so every time you look in the glass

it’s still hanging there where it wasn’t.

Would you take the money you needed

for a new roof on your old house

(the house you’re paying for

over and over in property taxes)

because it’s been leaking for years

and you’re tired of emptying buckets

and spraying for mold,

would you take that money

and get your face lifted?

Face-lift. They cut a slit

under your ears and pull up the slack

and they tack it with plastic.

Then they pull up the outer

skin and trim it because it’s too long and

fasten that. (Your skin

pulls loose from the fat like chicken skin.)

Because once you were almost

as beautiful as Jane Wyman ...

your friends all said that.

Of course at the time she was

married to Ronnie and you were

involved with the ASU—

a McCarthy suspect.

Forget about your neck.

They can’t do that yet.

A face-lift lasts five years.

So you could go on being a member

of new-speak and re-entry—

with the unsung benefits

of radiation and by then

your roof would have rotted anyway.

Or been recycled by some corporate kid.

But think how you’d rather

be stripped and streaked

and while you’re about it

get some implants of baby teeth buds

that they’ve taken from dead babies’ gums

and frozen for this sort of thing.

You could still die young.

Copyright Credit: Ruth Stone, “It Follows” from Simplicity. Copyright © 1995 by Ruth Stone. Reprinted with the permission of Paris Press, Inc.

Source: Simplicity (1995)