Haircut

by Les

So much hesitance about cutting, an act done
all the time, though not always to what grows too long.
Six inches of her hair fell to the floor. They whisked away
her excesses, and she thought of the need to truncate speeches
that ramble forever, or to kill off an emotion that lingers
whose name is nostalgia. She edits parts of her all the time,
clipping her nails religiously. She likes to travel without
baggage, just her ghosts, and the weight of air.

She had loved it about him, the mane he refused to trim
a live thing that climbed down the course of his back,
waterfall of black ivy. Grown past his shoulder blades,
it had ceased to be fashionable, like pennants
on the edges of wings, or the too-long tail of a kite
snagged on telephone wires. His was a rock star’s hair
spoiled by affected indifference.

They say human hair evolved so an infant could hold onto his mother
as she swam for the shore. Her memories of him were not life-
saving, though she fingered whorls of these as she watched them
sweep away the cuttings on the floor.

In the mirror, her shorn self looked back, innocent again.