(trans)lation
Once I was a maenad
a Bacchante nun married to a leopard-wearing god.
I ripped my own head off –
you should see the scar.
Now like Orpheus
I can’t look back
to a past I can’t reclaim
remember or disprove.
There are pictures.
Years of pinafores and smocks,
halters and velour
Christmas dresses.
My mother keeps them
a dozen albums
of who I never was
but pretended to be
wearing a skin that never fit,
put on in the dark and worn by mistake.
Now like Lot’s wife
I am frozen by remembering,
by the backward glance
into the missing yesterdays.
I emerged from my labyrinth
in another form, entire,
freer than Icarus,
a mermaid, a faun, a god,
a woman, a man, a myth.
Originally appeared in “Welter,” May 2009, RTP
