or eeuw, I had what sharp-chinned mischievous

faeries had—a little bright, little high, IQ!

When They Told Me God Could Read My Mind,

I learned to not know

what I was thinking.

I don’t know how it happened, if my mind

put its palms over its ears, so I

could not hear what was going on

in there. I summoned a blank in there.

In the same way, I called up

a ball of blaze, an oblong, hori-

zontal, flameless, heatless fire,

at the center and out almost to the edges

of my field of vision, when I was dreaming,

so I could not see what was happening.

Then I began to erase my face,

making its matter invisible,

so all someone who looked at me would

see was my spirit—no pleading eyes,

no drip WASP nose, no shut-held mouth.

I could speak unseen, as I used to intone,

in summer, from behind a pine,

“I am the pine.” The men I would love

could nearly see my heart—in my eyes and in the

shock oval of my face. And what can I thank

for protecting me? It was the human

psyche in me who knew to hide me

when I needed hiding, it was my species

in me who concealed me, without asking

or telling me, it was myself

who protected me—and once I felt I could

not be seen, it could be safe to sing.

Tender Bitter

When I started having tender thoughts about

myself as a child—that long, pointed

chin, those tiny eyes—I started having

tender thoughts of my mother. She would look

up, a lot—short for an adult—

with a look of dazed longing, her fine

straight hair wrapped wet around

many small rollers, and bound back with combs

put in backward, to give her hair

some height, or with a fillet like a goddess. My hair was

loopy, soft, lollopy like

flop-eared rabbits’ ears, she wrote

about it in my Baby Book, “Shar’s

not conventionally beautiful—but that

naturally curly hair!” I don’t think she would have

traded with me, she remembered her cold

Pilgrim mother, in my mom’s sleep,

slipping the bobby-pins out of the dreaming child’s

spit curls. We were big on trading—you were

supposed to want to take Jesus’s place

on the cross, as he had taken yours. I think

my mother would have died for me—

and I think I would have died for her—

is that how the other animals do it? Who

dies for whom? My mom sometimes

liked my mind—the odd things

I said—she would write about my mind in my pink

Baby Book. She came from ignorant

educated people of self-importance

and leisure. She did not see that what I

said was funny, like joking, it was

metaphor. But it charmed her. She would not have

taken it from me, she would not have known

what to do with it, nor did she want to

mar me, as her mother had marred her. My mother…

loved me. If she had not beaten me,