Sharon Olds Wrote a Poem About Being Photographed for Vogue

Which I will now quote more of than is likely strictly correct under the law:

And Sheri took out a medieval tool
and pinched, once, the tiny soft
eyelashes of each eye,
and the follicles in each eyelid shrieked
once. Then she took her little brushes,
and dunked them in emollient gunk,
colors of the woods light,
in earliest spring, no green yet, and I said,
I think you are the mother bunny,
petting my shut eyes at nap-time.
And I told her I had made a deal,
early on, with my fear that I was
distasteful to look at, my face ashamed
to be seen — you know, the usual — and my
deal was that my features were invisible,
as if when someone looked at me
they would see just my spirit, a changing
upright oval of colors, framed by the
dark and now silver matter of the hair.
She petted my closed organs of vision,
blessing them.

Isn’t that marvelous? Please read it all. I know we’ve been a little poetry-heavy recently, but it’s spring! That is just what one does. And it’s wonderful, too, how a great poet can write about anything. Maybe we should write our own poems about putting on makeup and doing our hair and microwaving soup and googling ourselves and trying to avoid Mad Men recaps if we haven’t seen the episode yet.