Real Hair Don't Melt

[dukealien]

Real Hair Don’t Melt


Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls 
around like a roaring lion, looking for someone 
to devour. —1 Peter 5:8


Once again Penelope is eating my tomatoes, the pink 
guffaw of her remorseless gluttony alarms me 
from my bed and into yet another sheet 
of dripping disappointment. It’s raining  the inventive characterizations are thick here, but make sense until...
in the backyard, but
not out front, which makes sense here, where, contrarily, they don't
if you think about it: dipping the oar backward
makes the boat scoot off ahead. A schooner is often 
said to cut through water but it’s more like folding, whistling 
through your gap tooth, or continuously
braiding hair. People don’t see movies for
the kiss, we want Godzilla. Eat your heart out, Humphrey. When I was a little the aside ends here
girl, I dreamed of having a sweet pig to call delicious break here - a hog to call
my own. Griselda would be pot-bellied, with silk lashes 
like custard and she’d have a golden mane which I would pass
the hours when I wasn’t being slowly murdered 
by myself weaving into baguette plaits. To be clear, Penelope the dream from youth ends here
is nothing like this dream. Her kingdom is all rage 
and jowls, a bowling over you don’t even realize 
has happened, only that the sky is suddenly  
where your shoes used to be. Godly Mrs. Helsaple, 
bird-dogging her apricot 
Brown Betty cooling on the sill is famously still sore 
about her hip, and will be until 
she mercifully dies. She forgets her home address, which pill 
to take this morning, and her seventeen 
grandchildren’s names, and her husband
passed away and it was days before 
she noticed, but a quarter or a grudge that woman 
clings to like a nose ring. I’d love to give description of Penelope the real pig ends here
Penelope a good piece of my brain, an apple ripe 
with maggots. Does my despair mean nothing 
to her, I ask with my hands spread 
like a pussy—alas, my doe-eyed axman has no word  "axman" is an abrupt change, threatening in fact
for that which we call sadness, or anything like shame. Some days 
she is fed to bursting, some nights she goes hungry. It always goes
the same: each time I slide the shed door open, she pricks up her ears
as if expecting death and grins. so if it's the narrator's shed, it's the narrator's pig - whose threatened end isn't spoiled apple pie but pork chops

It took several (I won't say "many") readings to parse this from... whatever I got from first reading to just a homey country tale with minor intimations of mortality.  I attribute part of the difficulty to the title:  the hair in the poem is (imaginary) Griselda's mane and eyelashes.  So it's all a complaint (with occasional tangents) contrasting Penelope with the pot-bellied ideal.

The demarcated-rain/rowboat/sailboat tangent seems intended to show how wide-ranging the N's other fantasies are.  Perhaps that's why the N fantasizes about Penelope *not* devastating the tomatoes, or understanding (at some level) that she (Penelope) is similarly at risk every time the shed opens.

So there are symbols, sort-of, but nothing too taxing once you get into the proper spirit.  There are traps or stumbling blocks near the beginning ("sheet" without immediately identifying it as rain is one) that are worth figuring out, but make the poem feel "difficult" until the reader has persevered further.

So, is it a bad poem?  Not at all.  The scripture, though, seems almost cheapened when the reader understands that Penelope is the lion - not the narrator running her thumb along the edge of the ax.  For some reason I thought - from the beginning until the N's own shed was mentioned as Penelope's home - that the pig was a neighbor's, not the N's own.  Not sure why; when considering edits, a clue might be in order.  Or not, since it becomes clear in due course.

The title's virtue isn't in making sense (between ideal and reality) but staking out the territory with "don't" instead of "doesn't" for a singular subject - a regional colloquialism.  Perhaps it could be improved by leaving that aspect but avoiding the distraction of "melt."

This would work better - quicker, anyway - in a collection of similar stories so the reader doesn't have to back-fill its environment (farm, country) after finishing the read.  Perhaps with a ittle fore-word ("I grew up in rural North Carolina...") to set the tone.