The Doll

I

Does she lose herself so completely in the roles she gives it

Because she can already feel taking shape there something of her

fate;

Dressing like older girls for dates, mimicking her mother,

Enacting the ways of being grown up in the world she sees about

her,-

A life she is in control of because it does not arise from within,

As an artist whose virtuosity is yet all that testifies to his talent.

The doll in which she lives bears for her by the terms of its exist-

ence

The perfection of the life that circumscribes it: love

That as yet finds the fullest expression of itself in vanity-

Combing its hair, a change of gown, a bath; the baby she rocks

in her arms

Whose claims on her body have been satisfied by her imagination

With her knowledge hanging like round red fruit in the tree

above her.

At this age when she lies down it is like her doll to go to sleep,

That by shutting its eyes is able to make it dark inside it;

She loves her doll for how much in every respect it is like her-

self-

The one detail that is missing she is not even conscious of: in her

play

Her pretense has that quality of stiffness in the attitudes of her doll,

Like a life of happiness waiting for loss to enter it.

u

The game she now plays is not one she can wake up from

Even when she grows tired, or pass as from a dream into sleep;

All about her, her role seems no longer in her hands:

Looking back she now knows her doll house was the thing grow-

ing up,-

Life itself is the real dream: a light shining from beyond horizons

within her,

Knitted into a pattern by sleep that hides its ends from her reach.

Doing the dishes, scrubbing the floors, patching clothes that are

worn,

She found that vanity was just the lock on the door to the home

of her love;

In the children whose hungry mouths she is now kept to fill,

The full weight of experience by which the body has knowledge

of itself, -

Held by the bed on which she goes to sleep at night,

Where in closing her eyes she does no more than draw the shades

inside the room.

In the imagination the real becomes life by giving up control of |

it,-

Performing her love a woman feels again in her hands the life

within,

As at the end an artist is no longer able to distinguish between art

and life:

The doll still lies somewhere in the attic tossed among the brooms

Wrapped in an old dust cloth or bit of silk from a worn-out un-

dergarment,

Become the life that had moved it from without.