​My Dashiki


This year it’s forty
but hanging in the attic
it looks like a little girl
hiding in the old coats.

Once it was a woman
out on a summer night
hand in hand with a man,
his own dashiki, white and black
and the colors of this new world, the streets
all dashiki, dashiki, dashiki,

Bright cotton flags
flying in fine weather.

There must have been a morning
when the bedtime story ended,
the colors up and flew
to their separate houses,
the fine cotton shrinking
into ghosts of children— 

Because we did not – Did we? – ever stop,
drop hands, and, hem over head,
pull off our proud smocks?
We women, we men,
when did we seep into these pale garments,
become these old and buttoned children?





My Face at 1000 Park Avenue


He wears a white coat, he is
fabulously smooth, clear, and tan,
he is handing me the mirror,

He is asking about my face,
what I see here at 1000 Park Avenue
in my 50th year.

"Take it from the top,"
he smiles, and I smile too.
This is what I came for.

In the brow—well, honestly?
Worry, anger. Ringing the eyes,
exhaustion, even fear, a bruise.
Around the mouth, reproach
and bitterness. And framing the chin,
disappointment like a flat tire.

He nods, happy.
We see it together: Not age,
but emotion!

Now I understand why no one says,
you look Old, no,
Old is not the problem, it is
anger, fatigue, bitterness.
It is that it has been such a long day.

That evening in front of my own mirror
I reflect--a little bewildered— 
on what I have seen:
this constant announcement to strangers
that I have spent much of this last, long night
up crying. For any woman in her right mind
what I am considering is more taboo
than answering an S&M personal, but damn!
I am tempted. Vanity? Buying back
youth? No, but something youth
never questions--the ability to walk into a room
once more, with one's own hard-earned secrets
secret.