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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=452485" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=452485" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The world is full of women<br>who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself<br>if they had the chance. Quit dancing.<br>Get some self-respect<br>and a day job.<br>Right. And minimum wage,<br>and varicose veins, just standing<br>in one place for eight hours<br>behind a glass counter<br>bundled up to the neck, instead of <br>naked as a meat sandwich.<br>Selling gloves, or something.<br>Instead of what I do sell.<br>You have to have talent <br>to peddle a thing so nebulous<br>and without material form.<br>Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way<br>you cut it, but I've a choice<br>of how, and I'll take the money.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=452485" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I do give value.<br>Like preachers, I sell vision,<br>like perfume ads, desire<br>or its facsimile. Like jokes<br>or war, it's all in the timing.<br>I sell men back their worse suspicions:<br>that everything's for sale,<br>and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see<br>a chain-saw murder just before it happens,<br>when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple<br>are still connected.<br>Such hatred leaps in them,<br>my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary<br>hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads <br>and upturned eyes, imploring<br>but ready to snap at my ankles,<br>I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge <br>to step on ants. I keep the beat,<br>and dance for them because<br>they can't. The music smells like foxes,<br>crisp as heated metal<br>searing the nostrils<br>or humid as August, hazy and languorous<br>as a looted city the day after,<br>when all the rape's been done<br>already, and the killing,<br>and the survivors wander around<br>looking for garbage<br>to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.<br>Speaking of which, it's the smiling<br>tires me out the most. <br>This, and the pretence<br>that I can't hear them.<br>And I can't, because I'm after all<br>a foreigner to them.<br>The speech here is all warty gutturals,<br>obvious as a slab of ham,<br>but I come from the province of the gods<br>where meanings are lilting and oblique.<br>I don't let on to everyone,<br>but lean close, and I'll whisper:<br>My mother was raped by a holy swan.<br>You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. <br>That's what we tell all the husbands.<br>There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=452485" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Not that anyone here<br>but you would understand.<br>The rest of them would like to watch me<br>and feel nothing. Reduce me to components<br>as in a clock factory or abattoir.<br>Crush out the mystery.<br>Wall me up alive<br>in my own body. <br>They'd like to see through me, <br>but nothing is more opaque<br>than absolute transparency.<br>Look--my feet don't hit the marble!<br>Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,<br>I hover six inches in the air<br>in my blazing swan-egg of light.<br>You think I'm not a goddess?<br>Try me.<br>This is a torch song.<br>Touch me and you'll burn.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Margaret+Atwood">Margaret Atwood</a></strong></div>