FASHION Poem: Fashion plate, by Jeff Bien

There is, in the last of the words, a regal tininess,
amnesia sprouting crinoline wings

crouched by a flower called honesty, a tiny purple flower,
that lives near the rock anemone.

Right beside the forget-me-nots, and the pantheon
of the dwarf-iris wildly singing

the morning doves, hoo-hooing, as the moon
is ladled beneath a single breath of cloud.

And the wisteria, like the straight man in the coming starlight,
and pantomime of silent platonic odes,

something like moon flowers, cloistered in day
and glistening, open like lovers’ lips before night.

The tide before it retreats into the vastness of an angry blue
where a jealous goddess creates love

in the genocide of all of human inaudibility,
spreading like thunder in the pluming tail of the bell heather.

And just now in this deft song of suffering,
a young red sapling begins to bend, like a holiness

choirs of rainbows, a petal chant in the mind
that seeks the end of itself, in this garden of names.

Bare as the living mannequin, whose clothes fall perfectly,
picturesque on the sacred ground, moulted there,

the illustration of what we are not, in the lithograph
of the hoop skirts, that ring in the tongue.

Of the early spring catalogue, scratching of stars
and the clockmaker’s verse, that naked, ticks away

like our very own heart, as another day turns
into a moment ago, in the fashion plate of all of time.