This Other Thing

My daughter Louise asks about shame

and I want to tell her about the seer,

Marie Taréis, who worked with colors

and mirrors. The way she took my egg

drawing, yellow in the middle, then orange

then indigo, moved a pyramid of two mirrors

over and around it searching for my soul.

But it was just an egg.

Other people’s drawings had symbols

multiplied and reflected—

the tree of life, Egyptian dancers,

a caduceus, gods and goddesses.

I cringed, kneeling at her feet

in a sweat of old shames.

The time Ellen spotted nits in my hair,

that old perv dribbling over my fat thighs,

thread worms, the squirm and itch. Age ten,

sneaking in to read Playboy magazines

under my father’s bed. Disgust whitening

his face when he caught me looking

and reading about the ways I would be seen.

Like that young priest colliding

with my dancer’s body all sweaty

and vital running up the stairs of the priory,

the pleasure in his smile quickly

changed to a pursed-up sneer, rejection,

blame, his shame smeared all over me.

Depression then, clinging to the bed,

even the purple green pink I saw haloed

around a rose, too witchy and weird

like the wildflower remedies

I used in my practice. Circles

of  women, their whispered secrets

and me a kind of sin-eater grubbing

in the muck. She moved the mirrors

searching for my soul in that childish drawing,

and I wished that I could do it all again.

I’d been so naïve when I made it,

playful like a child who’s forgotten

she isn’t loved. Somebody laughed.

The mirrors moved, opened,

kaleidoscoped the egg into a circle of candles.