What is stronger than a lion?
Samson to the Philistines
1
Named for the archangel Michael
this twice-born barber
snips my hair, his scissors
describing a halo
around my head
as if I were to be a nun
or Jewish bride.
2
I had forgotten
the shape
of the skull
defined by a wet comb,
and how my grandmother
braided my hair
so hard my eyes would ache.
She wore, in a silver locket
at her throat, the hair
of her long-dead child.
3
In this place perfumed
with flowers
and singed hair, girls
with the lowered eyes
of penitents
make of each woman's nails
a row of shields.
4
We are dreaming
of transformations,
of walking
into the world
somebody else.
5
In Rome once
standing before Titian's
Sacred and Profane Love,
I gazed at the women,
each coiffed
in that luminous paint,
and wondered
which was which.
6
I used to cut
my lover's hair myself.
Curls as delicate
as shaved wood
covered the floor,
and later the swaying curtain
of my hair
was all there was
between us.
7
Hair line crack. . . .
Hair trigger. . . . Hair shirt. . . .
I cross a palm
with silver
and sense the pillars
shake.
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by Linda Pastan, 1988
