A scrawny yank of a kid trying to be a @3Vogue@1 woman, I had a vision of myself developed from the negatives of fashion magazines and movies - careful angles of elegance that never changed their glossy pose through all their paper-doll dresses, and the great roses of women who bloomed like timed Disney flowers on the @3tabula rasa@1 of the screen. They were outlines to be grown into beyond my skeletal youth, possibilities of women, a collage of criteria. And it was because of them that I coveted my first strapless - a flurry of tulle with fat rouge spots of color hidden in its drifts. There was a family conference at which neither Monroe nor the cover of @3Vogue@1 appeared as witnesses. My father didn't think I could hold it up. My mother was shocked by an imagined horizon of her daughter's bare shoulders and I was forbidden my gown. In every woman's life there is a dress that was a dream, and the dream outlawed gets lost in the back issues of the years. But it's there, a resonance in the mirror. That's why your face is never enough, only a bare sketch, and you, with mascara and lipstick, paint in the women never filled. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...PROMETHEUS by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL MURMURINGS IN A FIELD HOSPITAL by CARL SANDBURG THE DEATH OF THE OLD YEAR by ALFRED TENNYSON A GULL GOES UP by LEONIE ADAMS THREE PASTORAL ELEGIES: TO THE READER (1) by WILLIAM BASSE TO M. I. by MATILDA BARBARA BETHAM-EDWARDS |