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THE SCARRED GIRL All glass may yet be whole She thinks, it may be put together From the deep inner flashing of her face. One moment the windshield held The countryside, the green Level fields and the animals, And these must be restored To what they were when her brow Broke into them for nothing, and began Its sparkling under the gauze. Though the still, small war for her beauty Is stitched out of sight and lost, It is not this field that she thinks of. It is that her face, buried And held up inside the slow scars, Knows how the bright, fractured world Burns and pulls and weeps To come together again. The green meadow lying in fragments Under the splintered sunlight, The cattle broken in pieces By her useless, painful intrusion Know that her visage contains The process and hurt of their healing, The hidden wounds that can Restore anything, bringing the glass Of the world together once more, All as it was when she struck, All except her. The shattered field Where they dragged the telescoped car 138 Off to be pounded to scrap Waits for her to get up, For her calm, unimagined face To emerge from the yards of its wrapping, Red, raw, mixed-looking but entire, A new face, an old life, To confront the pale glass it has dreamed Made whole and backed with wise silver, Held in other hands brittle with dread, A doctor's, a lip-biting nurse's, Who do not see what she sees Behind her odd face in the mirror : The pastures of earth and of heaven Restored and undamaged, the cattle Risen out of their jagged graves To walk in the seamless sunlight And a newborn countenance Put upon everything, Her beauty gone, but to hover Near for the rest of her life, And good no nearer, but plainly In sight, and the only way. Helmets 139 ...

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