Beauty

When the medication she was taking  

caused tiny vessels in her face to break,  

leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,    

my sister said she knew she would  

never be beautiful again.  

 

After all those years  

of watching her reflection in the mirror,    

sucking in her stomach and standing straight,    

she said it was a relief,  

being done with beauty,  

 

but I could see her pause inside that moment    

as the knowledge spread across her face    

with a fine distress, sucking  

the peach out of her lips,  

making her cute nose seem, for the first time,    

a little knobby.  

 

I’m probably the only one in the whole world    

who actually remembers the year in high school    

she perfected the art  

of being a dumb blond,  

 

spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab,    

tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill    

which was her specialty,  

 

while some football player named Johnny    

with a pained expression in his eyes  

wrapped his thick finger over and over again    

in the bedspring of one of those pale curls.  

 

Or how she spent the next decade of her life    

auditioning a series of tall men,  

looking for just one with the kind  

of attention span she could count on.  

 

Then one day her time of prettiness    

was over, done, finito,  

and all those other beautiful women    

in the magazines and on the streets    

just kept on being beautiful  

everywhere you looked,  

 

walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance  

in which you sense they always seem to have one hand    

touching the secret place  

that keeps their beauty safe,  

inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it—  

 

It was spring. Season when the young    

buttercups and daisies climb up on the    

mulched bodies of their forebears    

to wave their flags in the parade.  

 

My sister just stood still for thirty seconds,    

amazed by what was happening,  

then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head    

as if she was throwing something out,  

 

something she had carried a long ways,  

but had no use for anymore,  

now that it had no use for her.  

That, too, was beautiful.