Where I Wore It First | Where I'll Wear It Last

[redbrunja]

 I stole this directly from musesfool  (it's the poem she posted for today) but it's so awesome that I thought to myself, 'why wait until later to show this to my flist?'

Black Dress
~Laura Kasischke

I could go no further than that first line:
Spring comes even to the closet.
The words like little iron blossoms on a vine.

The parks full of people under a heathery sky.
The music of silverware, of violins.
Near the road, a woman paints
the pickets of her fence with blinding light.

When Herod sat down at the dinner table, the roasted
bird flew from the platter crying, "Christ lives! He is alive!"
It's spring, even at night.
The mushrooms damply reflect the stars.
All manner of pale flesh, opened up like eyes. Moonlight

on the jellyfish. In the dark
grass the startling muteness of a child's
white rubber rat.

But the closet. Even

in spring, the closet's a blind hive. A black dress

hangs at its center — like Persephone, it's

the closet's prisoner,
and its queen. Never forget,
it sings. I saw you then. I saw it all:

After the funeral, the riotous dance. After the wedding, the long

weeping and kneeling in the bathroom stall.

Oh, there are birds the world's
entirely forgotten (winter, amnesia) singing again
to the comings and the goings, the bright

and empty flashes,
the openings and closings. Sweetheart,
I'm leaving. Honey, I'm home. But that

black dress hangs always and omniscient in its single thought, its

accumulating mass — a darkness
tucked into another darkness:
where I wore it first,

where I'll wear it last.