Sleeves of oyster, smoke and pearl,
linings patterned with chrysanthemum flurries,
rippled fields: the import store's
received a shipment of old robes,
cleaned but neither pressed nor sorted,
and the owner's cut the bindings
so the bales of crumpled silks
swell and breathe. It's raining out, off-season,
nearly everything closed,
so Lynda and I spend an hour
overcome by wrinkly luxuries we'd never wear,
even if we could: clouds of--
are they plum blossoms?--
billowing on mauve, thunderheads
of pine mounting a stony slope,
tousled fields of embroidery
in twenty shades of jade:
costumes for some Japanese
midsummer's eve. And there,
against the back wall, a garment
which seems itself an artifact
of dream: tiny gossamer sleeves
like moth wings worrying a midnight lamp,
translucent silk so delicate
it might shatter at the weight
of a breath or glance.
The mere idea of a robe,
a slip of a thing
(even a small shoulder
might rip it apart)
which seems to tremble a little,
in the humid air. The owner--
enjoying our pleasure, this slow afternoon,
in the lush tumble of his wares--
gives us a deal. A struggle, to narrow it
to three: deep blue for Lynda,
lined with a secretive orange splendor
of flowers; a long scholarly gray for me,
severe, slightly pearly, meditative;
a rough raw silk for Wally,
its slubbed green the color of day-old grass
wet against lawn-mower blades. Home,
we iron till the kitchen steams,
revealing drape and luster.
Wally comes out and sits with us, too,
though he's already tired all the time,
and the three of us fog up the rainy windows,
talking, ironing, imagining mulberry acres
spun to this unlikely filament
--nearly animate stuff--and the endless
labor of unwinding the cocoons.
What strength and subtlety in these hues.
Doesn't rain make a memory more intimate?
We're pleased with our own calm privacy,
our part in the work of restoration,
that kitchen's achieved, common warmth,
the time-out-of-time sheen
of happiness to it, unmistakable
as the surface of those silks. And
all the while that fluttering spirit
of a kimono hung in the shop
like a lunar token, something
the ghost of a moth might have worn,
stirring on its hanger whenever
the door was opened--petal, phantom,
little milky flame lifting
like a curtain in the wind
--which even Lynda, slight as she was,
did not dare to try on.
descensus Averno facilis est