Before The Paint (Alice, Annotated #2)

In the garden, everything is corrected
before anyone calls it cruel.
White roses take the paint in silence.
No one asks what they were
before the brush found them.

I knew that world early,
the one with hedges, silver, lowered voices,
where the right children left each morning
in pressed uniforms
to schools with saints in the hallways.

I knew the manners of that world.
Which fork. Which vowel.
How to say please as if it cost nothing.
How to hold my back straight
and make composure look inherited.

What I did not have
was the shelter those things were built to protect.
My father drank.
My immediate family lived just outside the picture,
close enough to learn the arrangement.

So I went to public school
with the diction of another life,
public college too,
always carrying myself like someone
whose name should have opened a gate.

Catholic time moved strangely around me.
I was always behind on something sacred,
some sacrament already passing
from cousin to cousin
while I stood there unconfirmed and watching.

I learned early that appearances
were defended harder than children.
That silence could be praised as grace.
That wine became blood more easily
than shame ever became language.

Even being expelled at twelve
entered family history like a stain to be managed,
not a child in distress,
just another small embarrassment
to paint over before company arrived.

That is the genius of a good garden:
how little blood it takes
to keep the roses convincing.
How neatly rot can be trained
to climb a lattice.

So much of that world was floral.
Petals, lace, altar cloths, polished pews.
Beauty arranged with such discipline
it almost passed for goodness
unless you looked at the roots.

And still some part of me belonged to it,
in the wrist, the posture, the thank-you note,
in the instinct to make damage look decorative,
in knowing exactly how the garden worked
while never once being mistaken for one of its daughters.

The Queen would have approved.
Paint first. Punish later.
Call it order. Call it breeding.
Call the white rose disobedient
for refusing to bloom already ashamed.

I think that is what I was to them:
a flower too near the good china,
too difficult to place,
too plainly marked by what had happened
in the house behind the hedges.