WHEN ONLY YOUR INITIALS ARE ENOUGH

If outside is the new inside, “smoke and mirrors

translated into clothes,” the textures and tinctures

of these silks, these folds and glowings—

simulacrum as emanation, tone, name—

sleepy, like a sweep of cloaks, dreaming

of torsos in the empty white boutique.

Or “austere but anatomically implausible

designs” grafted from the mannequins

in deformed chains, “a determined

abstraction of nature and life,”

life’s mnemotechnical abstraction,

nature’s mechanical propulsion.

Dear monk, I love your cloak.

One day my life was a cowl

without a hem. “Voluminous trousers

with deep crumb-catcher cuffs”

an implausible rebuff. But it seemed

as much of paradise as we could speech.

Fruits of the body, inaudible as roots.

Fabric’s temerity, the pin wit bit.

I thought and thought, but nothing came out.

Weeds grew from the plot. I tear and wear them.