“ 'Figure with Meat' ”

by Lee Rossi

The museum tea room was full of bare-headed daughters
and mothers in large pale hats. It was the pastel
decade. My sandwich, cut into four

equilateral triangles, surrounded a perfect
dome of potato salad, my father’s bald head.
It was the decade of long-line panty girdles

and stockings that whispered when you walked.
We sat next to the reflecting pool where I could see myself,
already tall and lean with no loveliness to spare.

My mother talked the whole time about how nice
my dress looked, her voice like a fork clattering on china,
but I was lost in my reflected self,

a watery blonde with stringy hair.
Maybe I was drunk on hair spray and the scent of Chanel
rubbing against all those White Shoulders,

for when we entered the gallery, I saw a portrait
in lurid blues and blacks, slabs of bacon or beef
grotesque with pain, yet familiar, human as breakfast.

Do I need to say I was unable to look away?
My mother led me from the room like some kind stranger
must have led the zealot Saul

after he had fallen from his horse,
blind with a vision only he could see,
his heart a confusion of beauty and murder.