Headdress

The hat on the table
in the dining room
is no pet trained
to sit still. Three
pearl-tipped spears and Beulah
maneuvering her shadow
to the floor. The hat
is cold. The hat
wants more.

(The customer will be
generous when satisfied
beyond belief. Spangled
tulle, then, in green
and gold and sherry.)

Beulah
would have settled
for less. She doesn't
pray when she's
terrified, sometimes, in-
side her skin like
today, humming
through a mouthful of pins.

Finished it's a mountain
on a dish, a capitol
poised on a littered shore.
The brim believes
in itself, its
double rose and feathers
ashiver. Extravagance
redeems. O
intimate parasol
that teaches to walk
with grace along beauty's seam.

Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is former Poet Laureate of the United States. Thomas and Beulah won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Her seventh collection of poems, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, was published by W.W. Norton in 1999. The most recent of her many honors are the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the 1996 National Medal in the Humanities, the 1997 Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, and the 1998 Levinson Prize for Poetry magazine. Ms. Dove's song cycle Seven for Luck, set to music by John Williams and featured with the Boston Pops on PBS, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in July 1998, and her play The Darker Face of the Earth has been performed at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Crossroads Theatre of New Jersey, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

...