Thursday Verse: "The Scarred Girl" - James Kickey

The Scarred Girl

All glass may yet be whole
She thinks, it may be put together
From the deep inner flashing of her face.
One moment the windshield held 

The countryside, the green
Level fields and the animals,
And these must be restored
To what they were when her brow 

Broke into them for nothing, and began
Its sparkling under the gauze
Though the still, small war for her beauty
Is stitched out of sight and lost, 

It is not this field that she thinks of.
It is that her face, buried
And held up inside the slow cars,
Knows how the bright, fractured world 

Burns and pulls and weeps
To come together again.
The green meadow lying in fragments
Under the splintered sunlight, 

The cattle broken in pieces
By her useless, painful intrusion
Know that her visage contains
The process and hurt of their healing, 

The hidden wounds that can
Restore anything, bringing the glass
Of the world together once more,
All as it was when she struck, 

All except her. The shattered field
Where they dragged the telescoped car
Off to be pounded to scrap
Waits for her to get up, 

For her calm, unimagined face
To emerge from the yards of its wrapping,
Red, raw, mixed-looking but entire,
A new face, an old life, 

To confront the pale glass it has dreamed
Made whole and backed with wise silver,
Held in other hands brittle with dread,
A doctor's, a lip-biting nurse's, 

Who do not see what she sees
Behind her odd faces in the mirror:
The pastures of earth and of heaven
Restored and undamaged, the cattle 

Risen out of their jagged graves
To walk in the seamless sunlight
And a newborn countenance
Put upon everything. 

Her beauty gone, but to hover
Near for the rest of her life,
And good no nearer, but plainly
In sight, and the only way.

- James Dickey