Alopecia Sestina
BY KARA VAN DE GRAAF
The women in my family
lose their hair as they age.
I never noticed. As a girl, I believed they were always
that way: painted face,
hand full of rings, a haze
of stiffened hair with a hint of hard bone
showing through.
This was some other phase
of womanhood, tighter and leaner, a change
that never would happen
to me. But change
has a funny way of showing up. Now, at my age,
photos reveal a slow creep of
scalp at each phase
of my life, a ghost-self haunting younger days, always
just beyond my grasp.
I worried more about my bones,
that death would come from the inside, the white haze
of calcium leaching until I broke.
But no, my mind is hazed
mostly with fleeing hair, dark in the drain. I’m scared to change.
All my life I believed in beauty,
envied those girls whose bones
showed through their sweaters. Power is having a face for the ages,
a pair of lips that could cripple
a man, a line of them always
waiting outside for you at school. I wish it were only a phase
and not a sunken song that plays
forever underneath. But phases
don’t last until your thirties. And which death is worse? The hazing
of being a teenaged girl, the little mirror
in your locker, so you always
obsess over lip gloss, skip lunch, brush your long hair? Or this changing
body that becomes my mother’s more
each day, the slow show of age
like a play actors repeat until they fall over, the script set in your bones?
In high school we read a play:
Delilah, whom I imagined in boned
corset and heels, beguiling Samson with her wiles at each phase.
Oh, how I wanted to be her, but
I know now it’s wanting that ages
us, the sin swimming inside until all our eyes can see is haze,
a kindly blindness. Will the God
I worship ever change?
I think of my grandmothers and their wigs, their fingers always
scratching, desperate to conceal
what was shorn away. We were always
both—the crippled hero, the deceiving beauty, conjoined in bone.
This is real tragedy: to know yourself
only by what is fated to change,
to be cut from you strand by strand. And what is left at that phase?
A handful of hair streaking your scalp,
an old photo of your face under the haze
of glass, the one that looks just like your grandmother at age
sixteen. A girl I never knew in girlhood,
a woman whose glamor always fazed
me. Her body’s gone now, buried bones,
though somewhere underground a haze
of hair is sprayed sticky to her skull,
preserved in a coffin, where she can’t change or age.
