Pamela Franklin’s Neck

By Aleida Rodríguez

The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I’m not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate.
­—Margaret Atwood, “Surfacing”

I’d recognize it anywhere.
Ever since it unfurled like a sprout reaching for light
in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—
where her painter lover, kissing it,
says, “So sweet, the flesh of the neck.
If only it could be bottled and sold across a counter”—
I’ve been able to zero in
on Pamela Franklin’s neck.

Flipping channels, I can identify her
from behind within seconds,
even on mediocre reruns of
“The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Barnaby Jones,”
or “Circle of Fear,” where she plays twins,
one of them ghostly, draped in gauze,
a swamp orchid cloaked in haze.
I may not be the only one who admires it,
because the camera seems to linger,
ostensibly focused on the man’s face opposite her
but lolling dreamily—distractedly—the extended shot of her nape long
even for those taffy-paced analog days,
as if the camera had stopped listening to the guy,
lost in adoration of that reed holding aloft a dark bob.

Only twelve people in L.A., they say,
and it’s all done with mirrors.
Once, at the unemployment office on Las Palmas, up ahead
in a different line, I spied her neck angling upward
toward the watery banks of fluorescent light.
Only 5 feet tall, yet there’s something resolutely vertical
about her composure, her shoulders the definition of horizontal.
My eyes sipped long from that willowy stem
as she sported a brave bearing-up-in-public face.
Our eyes met once, fleetingly, as she glanced around
then slipped on her sunglasses with a pale tendril.
No matter—I was free to feast on the lovely nape
until she disappeared ahead in the stream.
She retired soon after, marrying a bibliophile
who pressed her like a bloom
between books.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)