Face Lift
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.