A scrawny yank of a kid trying to be a @3Vogue@1 woman, I had a vision of myself developed from the negatives of fashion magazines and movies - careful angles of elegance that never changed their glossy pose through all their paper-doll dresses, and the great roses of women who bloomed like timed Disney flowers on the @3tabula rasa@1 of the screen. They were outlines to be grown into beyond my skeletal youth, possibilities of women, a collage of criteria. And it was because of them that I coveted my first strapless - a flurry of tulle with fat rouge spots of color hidden in its drifts. There was a family conference at which neither Monroe nor the cover of @3Vogue@1 appeared as witnesses. My father didn't think I could hold it up. My mother was shocked by an imagined horizon of her daughter's bare shoulders and I was forbidden my gown. In every woman's life there is a dress that was a dream, and the dream outlawed gets lost in the back issues of the years. But it's there, a resonance in the mirror. That's why your face is never enough, only a bare sketch, and you, with mascara and lipstick, paint in the women never filled. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE OLD WOMAN by JOSEPH CAMPBELL THE COCK AND THE FOX, OR THE TALE OF THE NUN'S PRIEST by GEOFFREY CHAUCER STRANGE HURT [SHE KNOWS] by JAMES LANGSTON HUGHES SPRING'S WELCOME, FR. ALEXANDER AND CAMPASPE by JOHN LYLY TWENTY GOLDEN YEARS AGO by JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN THE ENTHUSIAST, OR, THE LOVER OF NATURE by JOSEPH WARTON |