Cameos

I've started reading Object Lessons by Eavan Boland, a book Scott bought me for Christmas and I'm just now getting time to read.  In brilliant prose, she explores the woman poet of our time, sharing her own experiences as an Irish woman writing and finding her poetic voice.  I love Boland's poetry, but it has been enlightening to read her autobiographical essays as well.  One of her quotes really interested me and it became the inspiration for a new poem I thought I would share.  The quote reads:

Her name. Her emblem. There was a complexity for me remembering the cameo, and the more I thought about it, the more complex it became.  To inscribe a profile in the cold rock. To cut a human face into what had once flowed, fiery and devouring, past farms and villages and livestock.  To make a statement of something which was already a statement of random and unsparing destruction.  All these acts were very far from being simple.  They were ironic and self-conscious.  They employed artifice and irony.  They put the stamp of human remembrance on the material of natural destruction.

Cameos


Their cameos were pinned and fastened on dress collars,
clasped chains around their slender necks -
antique gold framing, fingernail-colored background,
a French tip resembling the form of a woman.
From the side, you could barely tell them apart
from their small daguerreotypes -
like a fashionable identification.

Nanny's was rounded and full,
and made in a time when it meant something
to be the real thing. So was Granny's.
Mom's was an oval-shaped reproduction,
a shade darker,
a weathered coral shell,
roughened by the sand and wind.
They were kept on top of dressers,
inside a bed of blue velvet,
cushioned and protected against the world -
hidden like the rare jewels they were.

When mom would loosen it from her neck
on Sundays after church,
I would sneak back to take a peak at the small figure -
her back straight, eyes forward, head gracefully balanced.
Turning sideways, catching a glimpse
of the little figure in the mirror,
I didn't see the same feminine profile -
only wild curls sprouting from a head slightly
cranned to the left.
I laid the cameo back in its small box,
wondering if I would ever have one of my own.