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Posts Tagged ‘Audrey Hepburn’

On Halloween




I wake up as myself, but by 8:15 a.m.,
I am wearing a long black dress and long black gloves,
strings of pearls and my long brown hair piled high.
Once again, I am Holly Golightly, spontaneous and flirty,
eccentric and ambitious. How easily I slip into her world.
How quickly I start calling everyone darling.
How instantly I feel doe-eyed and feminine.
Though I am graying. Though I am no longer reed-like
or innocent. Though in real life I only wear yoga pants
and no one would call me glamorous.
How is it that forty years after I first met her
in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I still fall in love with her?
Confident, yet fragile. Elegant, yet humble.
I balance my long black cigarette holder in my hand
and take a long drag of the fake cigarette—
but it’s life I’m pulling deep into my lungs
getting buzzed on blue sky and white snow.
By noon, I have no idea who I am.
By midnight, though I am in yoga pants again,
the credits have yet to roll.

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It is not fancy, the campground,
with the bathroom down the road.
Gravel covers the tent site,
and the number 13 hangs akimbo off
the fence that was once painted brown.
I’m embarrassed to bring Audrey here,
but she sits at the red picnic table
in her simple black dress and diamond tiara
and sips her tea, looking at me over the cup
with her enormous doe eyes and she says
in a voice equal parts romantic and matter of fact:
“Everyone wants to be loved, don’t we?
Everyone looks for a way of finding love.
It’s a constant search for affection
in every walk of life.”

The box elder beetles are not as bad
this year as they were two years ago.
Still, they seem to be everywhere
and one climbs across the table
toward Audrey’s tea. She laughs
and brushes its red body away. I want to tell her
yes, yes I want to be loved. And
I have done terrible things in the name
of love, never wanting to hurt anyone.
But I am too nervous to treat her
like a friend. I have her on a pedestal,
though I am beginning to sense
that it is getting in the way. She senses it, too.
“I never think of myself as an icon,”
she says. “What is in other people’s minds
is not in my mind. I just do my thing.”

A low rider goes by on the dirt road
beside us, and Eminem smacks the air
with more talk about his mother.
I don’t know why it makes both of us laugh,
but we do, perhaps just because it is fun
to laugh. A mosquito lands in the middle
of her forehead, and I hesitate before
giving Audrey a slap, but I do.
And knock over her tea. What is there
to do but offer to make her another cup.
She says yes, and slaps me back.

“When you have nobody you can make
a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you,
that’s when I think life is over,” she says.
God, she is beautiful, I think, looking
straight into her eyes. That’s how I notice
the pedestal is lower, now. Before
I could not see how clear they were,
star-piercing, twin doors long since opened
by love knocking from the inside.

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