129 292
Poems
129
of Forget-me-nots.
To create their styles,
the world’s most clandestine hairdresser
must peel an orange
3
and break it into sections.
Mr. Gică visits each of the six chairs in turn,
chewing sections of a blue orange and
exercising his exuviable dexterity.
Then he sends the wives to the hair dryers,
from which they emerge with their auras intact, remade.
At dawn,
when the circles around their eyes sink lower than their
breasts,
the wives of tenors and soccer players
dive back into their silks, and
float
toward the door.
Like a murderous scarf,
he dresses them up to their heads (and down to their heels)
in the smell of hairspray.
3 cf. “What Mr. Gică Doesn’t Know”