Last night at the grocery store—shampoo aisle first,

as usual—“The Look Of Love” by Dusty Springfield

came on (damn those oldies, they make you shop more

when you’re forty-something-and shopping horny). 

She came on like the sound of husky silk,

the audible shell of a soul when stoked, sliding,

quietly, into white heat. I thought of her lacquered sheen,

 

her blonde back-combed beehive flip stacked

like a hairway to heaven; “The higher the hair, the closer

to Jesus”—Southern American psalm; how she once quipped

in an interview, “I’ve used so much hair spray during

my career, I feel personally responsible for global warming.”

 

I went home and played Dusty In Memphis twice

through, Where Am I Going? once, with never enough

Doritos. There wasn’t much worth recording, except

whenever her voice slid to falsetto with no breakage,

then I knew a soul is just one long reaction, noted—

 

As Dusty sings I float from high up and sight each Safeway,

Kroger or HEB that dots the globe as I hover suspended

in cheeto dust   pink sucrose   seventies lacquer and BHT—

surrounded in sparkling airborne clots like bugle beads

torn off a queen after her last drag show in El Paso,

she’s wiping her hands on her dress in a tumble

-weed alley before she’s disrobed, made to kneel—

 

I thought of how the black keys on Aretha’s piano stuck

to the white keys recently, and when the repair-man came

he noticed a dust on the white keys—a vibrant orange.

Forgive me Ms. Franklin for asking, he said, but do you eat

Cheetos a lot? She answered, The Queen is entitled

to snack with her 88s when she feels the spirit.

My hairdresser told me this—so you know it’s true.

 

He had lots of dirt on Dusty: his favorite linked

“Miss D.” with a famous American r&b songstress,

a pissed-off background-singer chick and a girlfight

in the street—over Dusty. He wouldn’t name names,

or say who won, just that Dusty sat coolly, legs crossing,

uncrossing, upon the hood of a nearby Rolls-Royce, chain-

smoking as Big Ben tolled and the babes came to blows.

 

In London he’d done Dusty’s hair for ages,

claimed Dusty was blind as bat, stood squinting

an inch from the mirror, to see what he’d done.

The look of love is astigmatic, often incites brawls

or binges, removal of clothing, clandestine fantasia

that stories itself into a mythic, imagined bouffant

we all sport, and you’ve got yours on now—

 

I can see it and child, it’s high and loud, entangled

as the Tower of Babel, before weaves and braids

and Final Net, before Dippity-Do became Don’t.

Isn’t every hair-burner a modern-day girlie-boy

Homer, a teasing Tierisias—sightless to how their

armchair folklore survives, how it falls or sets?

 

Tell it, tell, hairdressers of the world around your

tiny cauldrons, vials of peroxide, streaking mixes,

third cups of coffee; could you do me some high-

and low-lights and anecdotes, you know I will pass them

along to my twenty-two-bestest girlfriends, allelu; 

 

keep the chain chain chain unbroken, the vaulty truth

in the mix, work with the untouched-up grace

before the makeover, original color irrelevant;

our blotchy, ungelled selves like an endless clean-up

on Aisle Five, as we squint into light every morning

with spirits tousled until the first mousse-spritz or Pop-Tart;

 

praise product, praise this stocked ersatz democracy

of gossip, muzak, Aveda, Suave and the all-night super-

market; comb the hell out of dust and ash and unsung

bards of beards and closets, the hunger that glamour and

Motown and Stax cannot stop in the name of 2 AM,

when your check-card’s overdrawn

                      and Dusty and love look unrevivable.

 

Your mouths stay open like unsung doors.

Guide us to speak with a look like a beauty shop

Saturdays around noon—work that dusted,

common, truthful gorgeous lie of artifice:  look, love: 

help us make up the well-sprayed surface unpraised

we display to the world.

 

 

 

Good witches, until our outsides catch up

with our insides or vice-versa, please consult

and check us out, push those products like snacks,

let us know God’s both paper and plastic.