BOY WITH HIS HAIR CUT SHORT Muriel Ruykeser
Sunday shuts down on this twentieth-century evening.
The L passes. Twilight and bulb define
the brown room, the overstuffed plum sofa,
the boy, and the girl's thin hands above his head.
A neighbor radio sings stocks, news, serenade.
He sits at the table, head down, the young clear neck exposed,
watching the drugstore sign from the tail of his eye;
tattoo, neon, until the eye blears, while his
solicitous tall sister, simple in blue, bending
behind him, cuts his hair with her cheap shears.
The arrow's electric red always reaches its mark,
successful neon! He coughs, impressed by that precision.
His child's forehead, forever protected by his cap,
is bleached against the lamplight as he turns head
and steadies to let the snippets drop.
Erasing the failure of weeks with level fingers,
she sleeks the fine hair, combing: 'You'll look fine tomorrow!
You'll surely find something, they can't keep turning you down;
the finest gentleman's not so trim as you!' Smiling, he raises
the adolescent forehead wrinkling ironic now.
He sees his decent suit laid out, new-pressed,
his carfare on the shelf. He lets his head fall, meeting
her earnest hopeless look, seeing the sharp blades splitting,
the darkened room, the impersonal sign, her motion,
the blue vein, bright on her temple, pitifully beating.
Ruykeser’s poem has been on my mind because we are all cutting hair at home now. You might know this poem and her work. Precursor to Adrienne Rich, overshadowed by Plath, it seems like Muriel Ruykeser never gets enough attention. But I’ll argue the Ruykeser is the poet of our moment. Committed to social change yet completely attentive to poetic growth, Ruykeser’s poems do not bore with platitude or preach to the choir. Do you have her Collected Poems on your shelf? I’m ordering a used copy from BetterWorldBooks. In the poem above, she’s wins the award for the best use ever of an adverb in a poem. The “pitifully” beating vein in the last line is unforgettable. Somehow, we feel like the vein is beating still at this very moment in time. The adverb makes the girl immortal.
Prompt:
You get some fun choices today! Write a poem involving cutting hair, or scissors. Or, write a poem about siblings doing something together. I love this photo of my friend Lane’s mom and her brother.
I might write about my boys building a fort this week.
Journal: The Adroit Journal. Continuing our theme of siblings and children, the current issue features two new poems by David Roderick about being a dad.
Recipe: Negroni. After our whiskey cocktail detour, back to gin, Campari, and vermouth. Simple things are the best right now.
See you tomorrow!