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Some bright, discerning thing, and fail,

Proving once more the blindness of the male.

Annoyed, she stalks away

And then is back in half a minute,

Consulting, now, not me at all

But the long mirror, mirror on the wall.

The dress, now that she’s in it,

Has changed appreciably, and gains

By lacy shoes, a light perfume

Whose subtle field electrifies the room,

And two slim golden chains.

With a fierce frown and hard-pursed lips

She twists a little on her stem

To test the even swirling of the hem,

Smooths down the waist and hips,

Plucks at the shoulder-straps a bit,

Then turns around and looks behind,

Her face transfigured now by peace of mind.

There is no question—it

Is wholly charming, it is she,

As I belatedly remark,

And may be hung now in the fragrant dark

Of her soft armory.

Cosmetics Do No Good

STEVE KOWIT

after Vidyapati

Cosmetics do no good:

no shadow, rouge, mascara, lipstick—

nothing helps.

However artfully I comb my hair,

embellishing my throat & wrists with jewels,

it is no use—there is no

semblance of the beautiful young girl

I was

& long for still.

My loveliness is past.

& no one could be more aware than I am

that coquettishness at this age

only renders me ridiculous.

I know it. Nonetheless,

I primp myself before the glass

like an infatuated schoolgirl

fussing over every detail,

practicing whatever subtlety

may please him.

I cannot help myself.

The God of Passion has his will of me

& I am tossed about

between humiliation & desire,

rectitude & lust,

disintegration & renewal,

ruin & salvation.

Face Lift

SYLVIA PLATH

You bring me good news from the clinic,

Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white

Mummy-cloths, smiling: I’m all right.

When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist

Fed me banana gas through a frog-mask. The nauseous vault

Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.

Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.

O I was sick.

They’ve changed all that. Traveling

Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,

Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,

I roll to an anteroom where a kind man

Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious

Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two

Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard . . .

I don’t know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,

Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.

Even my best friend thinks I’m in the country.

Skin doesn’t have roots, it peels away easy as paper.

When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I’m twenty,

Broody and in long skirts on my first husband’s sofa, my fingers

Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;

I hadn’t a cat yet.

Now she’s done for, the dewlapped lady

I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—

Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.

They’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar.

Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,

Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.

Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,

Pink and smooth as a baby.

Fatigue

HILAIRE BELLOC

I’m tired of Love: I’m still more tired of Rhyme.

But Money gives me pleasure all the time.

The Great Lover

RUPERT BROOKE

I have been so great a lover: filled my days

So proudly with the splendor of Love’s praise,

The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,

Desire illimitable, and still content,

And all dear names men use, to cheat despair,

For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear

Our hearts at random down the dark of life.

Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife

Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far,

My night shall be remembered for a star

That outshone all the suns of all men’s days.

Shall I not crown them with immortal praise

Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me

High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see

The inenarrable godhead of delight?

Love is a flame:—we have beaconed the world’s night.

A city:—and we have built it, these and I.

An emperor:—we have taught the world to