**the poem loses some meaning if it's not spaced and italicized as hadas meant for it to be. i couldn't find a link to the poem anywhere. i almost didn't post it for that reason but i like the poem and i like hadas. young bitch and other interesting hadas poems are in "self-evidence: a selection of verse 1977-1997"

helpful information:

the quote from the rhyming dictionary is italicized and so is the title of the dictionary. in the final four line stanza, listens, skill, self, person, stealth and coffin are italicized. AS IF is italicized. the last two lines of the poem are jutted to the far right.


Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bitch

-elf: delf, elf, Guelph, pelf, self, shelf...
Random House Vest Pocket Rhyming Dictionary


She owns such a sad little life.
She writes about it all the time.
She whines. She is no body's wife.
And she would make that rhyme.

Or else she's Queen of Heroines:
"Some genius should write about me
How curious, how scrupled my sins..."
(She sighs) "...what delicate irony

I'd like to provoke." She loves a man,
And she has left him, too.
She's apt to make fun, as much as she can,
Of the ruins she's capered through.

She studies the books on her shelves,
The ones she thinks might translate her
Wonder to order, yield slants on her selves,
Or morally tag her with words as obscure

And ashamed as her own. She pays
In hard-earned coin the market price
For sainthood: willful despair and disgrace.
She'd love to spend forty days in some nice

Hot desert: exile, mangling, hood.
"Let me go for broke, cracked belle
Of despair; let my halo ring wide
Of my dome, Saturnian ruffle."

She listens for unlikely rhymes, as if
a skill could mask self in person,
stealth rattle soft music from coffin;
sound tune bone to reason;

AS IF:
her epitaph.