Don Thomas wrote and read a poem about hair.
It was one of the powerful secondary sexual
characteristics of people that gather you up and give you
a universe doors into this universe
of the other half of the world.
And I have mine here, too.
But this one doesn't talk about music, talks about water--
still water, which may be the same thing, in fact,
because they both flow.
Now this poem is called "Young Women with the Hair of Witches
and No Modesty."
And in it, I think of a person who has always loved water
and praised water, as I've been trying to do
in the last couple of poems.
But he's fallen in love with a witch.
A witch woman, a woman with beautiful hair.
And this hair is to him as though all the flux and flow
of the world have become focused and arrested and almost
petrified in his concern for this woman.
For which the hair is the sign and symbol of her sexuality.
And they are all this concern of his
for the universe is gathered in this one
image, this woman, this hair.
And so he speaks about this and where water cannot betray,
a woman can.
And he is so subject to the moods of this woman
that he speaks this small elegy for the loss of an innocence.
I give it the epigraph from Hamlet.
"I loved Ophelia."
I have always loved water and praised it.
I have often wished water would hold still.
Changes and glints bemuse a man terribly.
There is champagne and glimmer of mists.
Torrents, the distaffs of themselves, exalted, confused.
And snow splintering silently, skilfully, indifferently.
I have often wished water would hold still.
Now it does so, or ripples so, skillfully.
In cross and double cross, surcross and counter cross.
A person lives in the darkness of it watching gravely.
I used to see her straight and cool considering the pond.
And as I approached, she would turn gracefully in her hair.
Its waves betraying her origin.
I told her that her thoughts issued in hair
like consideration of water.
And if she laughed, that they would
rain like spasms of weeping, or if she wept then solemnly
they held still.
And in the rain, the perfumes of it, and the blowing of it,
confused, like hosts of people all shouting.
In such a world the bride walks through dressed as a waterfall,
and ripe grapes fall and splash smooth snow with jagged purple,
young girls grow brown as acorns in their long climb
towards oakhood, and brown moths settle low down
among ivories pale with love.
But she loosened her hair in a sudden tangle
of contradictions, in cross and double cross, surcross
and counter cross, and I was a shadow in the twilight
of her late displeasure.
I asked water to stand still, now nothing else holds."