You Said You Wanted a Verbal Seduction
My sister told me that the hanging moss
frosting the primal oaks of our scour-green neighborhood
was old women’s hair that slipped from their heads
on their way to heaven. They didn’t need it, she said,
they’re perfect. I would tear the grey clumps
from the wrangled limbs I could tip-toed reach
and rake it with one hand, then stuff and braid it
through the arms of my bulk-round, tortoiseshell glasses
and hairbanded tufts. I’d bike the boughs
of the neighborhood steeping in the heat
but feeling a new kind of pretty
with the long swish of moss casting the sweat
over my tan tank-topped back as I pumped up the hills
and rode back down holding onto nothing
but the picture of the old women now young,
cool and softened, my view the lens of a frosted glass.
They wore smooth skulls, health-red mouths,
and light and nightgowns, sprawled placidly
around Jesus, their fingers brisk and thin
braiding his supple, deep hair.
I told you this story lying in our marital bed, staring
at the stain on the wall I swore was shaped like Spain,
and you said that wasn’t at all what you wanted.
So, I turned on my side, facing you and slid
slow to stand letting my hair, now a long, long drown
wash over your body with the fumes of vodka, hairspray,
and expensive yet salaciously named perfume
I donned for that months-belated dinner date
and imagined it spread and settle onto you
like a steady, black silt.
Caroline R. Freeman is a poet born and raised in Mississippi. She's the recipient of a Literary Artist Fellowship grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission and was a Lannan Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. She's a winner of the Fish Poetry Prize and will be published in the forthcoming anthology. After receiving her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland, she has enjoyed teaching writing classes at colleges and universities in Maryland, Tennessee, Texas and Mississippi. She and her husband, Will, are raising a beautiful baby girl and a spirited four-year-old in Hattiesburg where she aggressively gardens and fancies herself the family historian.