11.21.2025

THIS HAIR

This hair! All I can do is wash it again
for the seventh time in two days and just pray
it doesn’t look all Gidget Goes Hawaiian
the way it did yesterday and this morning,
which can happen when your hair is much too short
to begin with because you went for a cut
out of town at your sister’s chichi salon
where a clip artist, diva and seasoned pro,
left you with chic stubble that needed to grow,
and ten weeks later, back home, you got a trim
from Sandy at the SmartStyle inside Walmart.

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NOTE
Until six years ago, I had always lived in big cities, so I was spoiled by the ease of getting a decent haircut. Not to say there weren’t exceptions. A cut in Seattle, in 1991, had me wearing headscarves for months. Second place among the fiascos goes to a 1997 shearing I suffered on Irving Street in San Francisco. I remember shouting STOP!

I got the best haircut of my life in 1984, at a Supercuts franchise in Berkeley. That stylist immediately moved on to waitressing, and better tips, but she opened my mind to the possibility that genius can turn up anywhere, if not necessarily at the Valley Drive Walmart in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

This poem, the second ever to be posted here, first ran almost three years ago. Now its moment has come again, but not because of a second visit to SmartStyle. No, this repost comes to you fresh from a local salon with grander pretensions. Aspirations to higher ground as well, if one can judge from the snippets of Scripture tacked up on the walls—all those calligraphed prayers must be there for a reason.

Anyway, it’s my good luck to have healthy, fast-growing hair and two ears to tuck it behind. While the sawed-off strands recompose themselves, I’ll be breaking out my collection of berets, straw hats, and baseball caps and remembering that worse misfortunes have befallen humankind.

As for the poem, it’s from the genre I call my unrhymed syllabic pseudo-Petrarchan sonnets (11 lines, 11 syllables per line). Sometimes I think this one reads like the beginning of a poem that should be longer. Then again, what more is there to say? A thing can simply be too short, and that can just be the way it is.

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Not the author