- Clippings
I. Some Monday Nights
My mother gathered cutting shears and the razor stashed among aftershave, shoe polish, pennies, and buttons set loose from their collared shirts.
She was the Mississippi guiding my father to his chair at the kitchen table where her fingers moved like rivulets through his thinning hair. She cut evenly
around the base of his thickly lined neck. When finished, she stripped the towel clipped around his shoulders. Her hands brushed away hair that clung
like ashes on the first of Lent. His evening ended with the Milwaukee Journal, this act burning as he touched the top of his head, the nape of his neck. And she set to work, sweeping it all up.
II. The Morning of My Sister's Wedding
We attended the beauty salon the way one attends church, mindful in the cathedral of shampoo and permanents. My mother, under a dryer with her hair wrapped [End Page 505]
to the scalp in rollers, described the details: bouquets, hoop dresses, matchbooks inscribed with the date. My sister and I, then nineteen and four, sat in raised chairs side by side, staring
into each other's reflections, not knowing exactly how Milwaukee would look different that night. The women behind us wore frosted blue eyeshadow and called me "hon."
They twisted and tied our hair high above our heads. This was how we were braided with ribbons, how we were knotted together, how the past was shorn and stolen away in our pockets.
III. Losses
Chemotherapy must have been simple, relative to the surgery that left my mother bald along one half of her head. Doctors with their good intentions and scalpels had split her skull
to operate on cancer's far-reaching effects. There was no way to save the remaining hair brushed away from the scar. During the last months, a turban that matched housecoat and eyes framed her jaundiced face.
She was the naked tree of Ordinary Time stripped to its bark. Some days, when visitors called like migratory birds, she wore a hairpiece fashioned in her familiar style.
But she was never at peace in a wig woven from the hair of strangers. How can we be modest when all we are buried with is our thin shell and the color of yesterday?
IV. Years Later My Father Phoned
We would visit my mother's grave. He made a note of it and one to call [End Page 506] the barber. I was forced to create my own memory of him, raised
in a swiveling chair with his arms resting on a tidal stomach. The radio was tuned to a station that favored Nat, Bing, and Frank while a mute TV scrolled scores
from a golf tournament. He chose not to notice the hair that fell to his shoulders like petals nor the way his life had been trimmed neatly of years with his wife.
He looked the same when I next saw him. A little more gray near his ears, I thought, as he placed a Pick 'n Save bouquet that would yield to the wind.
V. Hands Trembling Like Music
I raised the electric razor to the hair around your ears, your neck, the impossibly small folds of skin. You were warm and red from our shower.
I worried about cutting too much, about nicking the skin like a novice. Moving with the energy of waves, forward and back, in imperfect circles,
I strained to cut even lines. Suddenly I was in my mother's body, knowing the curves and edges of love. It is being blind- folded and spun along the narrow
trails of canyons. Your cut hair clung to our bodies: little fibers fixed on me, on you, on this inevitable passing between the cells of memory and the moment. [End Page 507]
Andrea O'Brien's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Nimrod International Journal, Connecticut Review, and The New York Quarterly. She lives in central Kentucky.