_______________________________________________________
Portrait of Nymphs Bathing
After the painting A Mermaid by John William Waterhouse, 1900
I thought I might as well transform
into a great silver fish
as turn from girl to woman.
It was like this: everyone watches
you bloom open like a terrible rose
reeking of new beauty, thudding life.
One day you comb your hair,
still dripping from the shower, and you are not
simply combing your hair.
Always, your portrait is underway.
That first summer of our revelation,
my friend and I undress
in her cold bedroom and pull
one-piece swimsuits on over our shifting forms.
We turn our backs—
another new thing—create an interval of air
for each other, a brief privacy
we’ve only just discovered that we crave.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Aza Pace’s poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, Crazyhorse (now swamp pink), New Ohio Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes and an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of North Texas.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
John William Waterhouse, A Mermaid. Oil on canvas, 1900
Go to Source
Author: Terence Winch
