The coats are on the bed, the fur, the red wool, mine with a missing button,

the cat on top of them all.

There's a row of perfume bottles on the dresser, prisms in a mirror, little flasks

with glass stoppers, gold string, red sealing wax.

Tabac Blond

I am reading a label: Tabac Blond. I know that scent.

It's a funky, tawny oll, woody, light, smoky.

It smells like the skin of a blond woman

in a black dress, satin, thighs,

a silver cigarette lighter, a revolving

mirrored ball, sad music, a love affair.

My aunt used Tabac Blond.

She was fat and narrow-waisted,

a Reubens woman with long amber hair.

She wore it in two fat bralds around her head.

My sister and I would beg her to take down her braids so we could watch her sitting on her hair.

She sat so gracefully, so fatly and with such power. And she knew so much. She lived in the world. She knew about people's minds and why they-were crazy or dumb or why they were bad. She gave everybody tests. She could find out why they were crazy. It was all on paper.

She told us stories-cases, she called themand we knew she knew everything.

And she smelled of Tabac Blond. Secrets. What we didn't know. The Russian blouses she liked to wear, red and black poppies on her fat breasts. Crystal beads, letters in her dresser drawer. The lock of her mother's hair that she saved.

And the scent of Tabac Blond

In the slips and handkerchiefs.

I thought all women smelled like a perfume.

My mother was Toujours Mol.

Windows filled with plants, balalalka music, sunlight on the oriental rug, the sad gypsy music on the piano.

}

"Well," she would say from time to time about a new beau. "I suppose I should marry this man.

But, I must admit, he's no answer to a maiden's prayer.'

"Well!" My mother always answered in a huffy voice "You're no maiden!”

Her closest call was to a world traveler. But, "no", she said finally.

"I don't want to be so far from my dentist."

Oh, and when she played the piano her earrings swung back and forth and caught the light. Candles, wine. And she knew real gypsies. And she could sit on her hair and she knew all about crazy people. She lived in the city.

When I stayed with her I slept in her bed. Pale blue walls, pale blue sheets,

a Japanese print on one wall,

and when the lights from the city moved across the room, the fan seemed

to open and close. Cherry blossoms,

a woman in a kimono

crossing a bridge.

The groaning of a trolley car, the slow revolving of shadows, a boat whistle on the river. Canada was on the other side, and somewhere across the river was a great circle of green lights.

I would lie in bed listening

to the roaring of the night and wonder about the lights, what the green circle was, whether

it was in that other country, or here.

You think magic runs out,

but it always comes back.

Sitting In the hospital bed

drinking tea, her long gold hair

rippling down her back, she was sixty-four,

still fat and narrow-waisted,

and there was a man wanted to marry her

when he got back from Hawaii.

When my sister and I were going through her things,

the crystal beads, the scented handkerchiefs,

the letters, were all in the drawers,

the photo of her Japanese prince.

They were very young. The music box

he gave her before he left. The book.

of poems with the black and silver cover.

The lock of her mother's hair.

And a bottle of Tabac Blond.

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Page 6/What She Wants/April, 1982

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ملية

1978 by Barbes kumal

-Barbara Angel!