luxe, calme et volupté

Sleeves of oyster, smoke and pearl,
linings patterned with chrysanthemum flurries,
rippled fields: the import store's

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,

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,

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

like moth wings worrying a midnight lamp,
translucent silk so delicate

of a breath or glance.
The mere idea of a robe,
a slip of a thing
(even a small shoulder
might rip it apart)

in the humid air. The owner--
enjoying our pleasure, this slow afternoon,

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;

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,

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

What strength and subtlety in these hues.
Doesn't rain make a memory more intimate?
We're pleased with our own calm privacy,

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,

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.
Mark Doty
from Sweet Machine by Mark Doty. All rights reserved, HarperCollins Publishers.
Labels: childe hassam, costume, davidson knowles, fashion, Gekko Ogata, korin ogata, mark doty, masriera, paquin, poetry, robert reid, tadamuni torii, women, yoshu chikanobu