Brush your teeth twice each day with soda and salt.
Take a tub bath with soda and ammonia at least two times each week.
Wash your hair twice each month with soft water, soda, and vinegar.
-from guidelines for relief clients in a Depression-era resettlement community
Teenaged, locked in the bathroom, in a gaze with what a mirror
framed, I listened to my father chide, Such vanity! outside.
In any age has someone not been trying to believe grooming,
cleansing, could be salvation? I still sit in soda soaks today,
as people in poverty, in the Depression, were instructed to do
by hygiene advisors. As likely the woman did who scoured
a glass and pitcher that appear, rather than her, in an archival
scrap of film. They’re so spotless, so crystal clean, to view
them is to look clear through. And, though she arranged
these two vessels too plain to be vases to hold a toothbrush
before the photographer came, they’re positioned so far below
eye level, they surrender all to the floral wallpaper.
A still life so static an editor defaced it by gouging out a hole,
a dark, hovering round of removal, a stark, aerial plum or apple.
When I was young, I thought the vain luxuriated in beauty,
I was unlike them because I was magnifying, illuming,
what required improvement, and my father got it all wrong.
I had not yet seen vanitas, works of art in which flowers
are included to suggest wilting to be done. Skulls, hourglasses
with scant sand, and smoke serve as symbols of what ends.
Bubbles too. They burst (or, in baths grown cold, in my case,
are sucked down by a tub’s spiraling drain, below ground).
A vanitas is what the editor rendered this irredeemable
photo. His mark of rejection—a circular, night-colored blot—
is fruit gone to rot. It’s a contribution, really, an addition
of tension and truth. There was a time when I did not know
how much good efforts expended on the ever body come to,
or how I’d wish to hear my father’s voice again. Wish—
to use the word, as he had, rightly—in vain.