Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Bedecked

By Victoria Redel

Tell me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or
the toy store rings he clusters
four jewels to each finger.

He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the
star choker, the rhinestone
strand he fastens over a sock.
Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he
says sticker earrings
look too fake.

Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong to love the
glitter, that a boy’s only a boy
who’d love a truck with a remote that revs,
battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels
loop-de-looping off tracks
into the tub.

Then tell me it’s fine – really – maybe even a good
thing – a boy who’s got some girl to him,
and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on
the seesaw in the park.

Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away
from my son who still loves
a beautiful thing not for what it means –
this way or that – but for the way facets set off
prisms and prisms spin up
everywhere
and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows –
made every shining true color.

Now try to tell me – man or woman – your heart was ever that brave.




Excerpted from Swoon by Victoria Redel (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Image: Pierre et Gilles.

1 comment:

William D. Lindsey said...

Michael, thank you for introducing me to a poet I don't know, but whom I'll now read with great interest.

That poem hurts--as a really good poem should. It hurts because it hits the heart and makes the heart take notice. I'm smitten by it and now want to read anything of hers I can find.