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"Femme Fatale"

By Averill CurdyPosted Tuesday, June 1, 2004, at 11:50 AM ET

Listen to Averill Curdy reading this poem.

Be mysterious, she'd say to our reflection.
Beneath her hands, my head would nod
As she tugged the rat's-tail comb herky-jerky,
Disciplining curls. I wondered what she thought
For sixteen years she'd raised? I'd droop
My eyelids, toss my hair, practice looking
Heartless. Je refuse. I don't know how
Cliches could feel like the very reach
And tendon of love. As if with sunbleached eyes,
On swollen, bloodied feet, she'd survived—
Deserts spread beneath the sky's denunciation;
Rhododendron groves of Himalaya—
To bring her message back to our
Suburban bathroom. Too late to ask
What in her woman's past those words
Might save me from. Another sixteen years,
At least, were spent before I learned to be
Not act, turning from the mirror to rinse her hair
Emerging from the scalp like winter grass.
Even days famined by our austere routines
Held their germ of beauty, or joy, caught through
Our bleached reflections in the window.
A woman shrugged polkas from her accordion,
Spilling music like coarse sugar; commuters idled
In exhaust-borne billows of cottonwood seed,
The stubborn evangelists for streams buried by the city.
A summons, or permission, a suggestion
From the only afterlife we're given: be mysterious.

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Averill Curdy lives in Columbia, Missouri where she is finishing her Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at the University of Missouri.

Click here to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.

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COMMENTS

Remark from the Fray:

I think this poem isn't as much about mystery as it is about the absence of mystery. Probably that is an intentional irony. The woman's mother has admonished her to be mysterious, but the merciless images lay her poor old mother down to the bone. She has no physical, emotional, or spiritual secrets left.

"turning from the mirror to rinse her hair / emerging from the scalp like winter grass"

That would be cruel if it weren't so touching, such a moving description of the ministrations of a kind and loving daughter.

The only thing left, the poem seems to say, for which we can be mysterious, is death. At least that's where I feel it's leading. The title of the poem may be read as the cliche, or as the literal description of a deadly (moribund) woman.

I find this very sad and touching story about women. Perhaps the point is partly to deride vanity, but I think it's more about how we grow up learning to have secrets, to hide how we feel, what we think. It's part of our inner sanctum, the only place we have that is really our own. There is a sense of shame associated with being "discovered" in some unexpected way, that if the truth about us were revealed we would be caught in some kind of -- I don't know, is fraud too strong a word? Perhaps men have this too, i don't know…

--DemiMundane

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