Poem Inspired by a Bloomingdales Ad
“Beauty Lovers! Take 25% off on almost all beauty.”
–Bloomingdales ad
I’ve cultivated ignorance of the Beauty aisle. Its promises never inspired me.
Decades ago, I vowed never to be ashamed of the face I was given.
I built my scaffold with bones, pushing bare-faced into sun and wind. I sketched beauty as truth. Maybe I mollycoddled myself.
Is beauty a waterfall or a braid? Is truth a boutonniere or a ravine? Over serendipity, I will always choose the sycamore.
The most beautiful things I know: The brow of the Mevlevi, listening as he spins. Hildegard von Bingen’s melismatic Alleluia. The tambourine’s silver zills, jingling. Georgia O’Keeffe’s watercolor of Lake George. The Palace of Winds in Jaipur. Lovers on the subway, woven into each other. I want to needlepoint my list to Mount Fuji.
I swim in camelia. I gorge on the scent of cloves.
If truth is a jack pine, when will the fire ignite, to germinate new seeds?
Now, my face is old. The unvarnished truth no longer bewitches.
News footage scalds my eyes. I am steamed. I am flummoxed, misplaced. Anxious exhaustion overpowers my mind. Hoping to rotate my dislocation, I self-medicate with Vivaldi, baby pictures, the remembered scent of baked peaches, humble warrior pose.
The movement of air in a house when the front door blows open.
What beauty will I cultivate now?
If the columnists’ predictions come true, will the calamity be beautiful?
I look up. The TV’s on–
And for reasons I can’t explain, the arc of a three-pointer awes me. The basketball flutes through the rim, a thing of beauty.
.
Code Red Air Quality Alert
The sun, effaced by yellow haze, hovers
red as rust. My meadow, a palimpsest.
Warned to stay indoors, nevertheless
I open the back door–
A sudden gust of traffic
and smog assaults me!
The odor of charred forests.
Moss burned at the stake.
I shiver.
I slip unseen into the meadow’s new dinge
the ground under my flip-flops unyielding as granite.
The forecast drought – and, now, smoke.
A distant crackling.
In the north, temperatures rise
combust, spark, flare,
pyre. A thousand miles away,
rivulets of burnt particulates rush and spill.
The confluence of carbon
puddles here, in my backyard.
Soaked dry. I am crustacean.
Wildflowers leaf and bud,
brush my shins with their questions.
From the buckeye, a jay chides me.
A deer renounces the meadow path.
My eyes sting,
my head aches. I rasp.
But I cling to purpose –
to check on my garden.
Eyelids encrusted, I strain to see
the red crowfoot, dangling bat-like,
goldenrod in the tepid haze,
palms tipped skyward.
Months ago, I planted these seedlings,
shoveled the hard clay and watered, hoping
for a downpour of butterflies.
Instead, I drown in the Butterfly Effect.
Canadian smoke blackens magnolia in Philadelphia.
Like the milkweed, I turn upward, and ask,
if air currents weave together,
if roots hold hands under our feet–
can’t the clouds spill other particles– columbine, bergamot and grace,
herbs wilder and more fertile
than any wildfire smoke?
© Faith Paulsen
Author of three chapbooks and mother of three sons, Faith Paulsen’s day job is in insurance. Her work appears or is upcoming in Scientific American, Poetica Review, Poetry Breakfast, Milk art journal, Philadelphia Stories, Book of Matches, One Art, Panoply, Thimble, Evansville Review, Mantis, and others.
https://www.faithpaulsenpoet.com/
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