The husks of harvested cocoons
Lie strewn across the salon floor
Like skulls from a late 14th century Asiatic battle;
The zinc baths bristle, acidically
drizzling dissolving gristle into vats
to liberate the trim from taints of flesh
And knurled thimbles, prized,
Are prised from pricking thumbs to roll
Quite unsurprisingly beneath the plan chest in the corner.
They fall from hands whose spans
Have spun the looms to stretch the thread
Towards the invisibility of spiders’ silk
And as inescapably, webbily, envelopingly sticky as a swab.
And the stitching is exquisite.
The patterns in the plan chest, chalked templates
Covering greasy tracing paper & pinpricked to a bruise,
He cuts a different way.
But the stitching is exquisite,
Warp and wefting through the billions of junctions,
Just snagging for a second on the pointillistic air
Then double stitching through each brace of lungs, then to the next
In blurs of movement sleeker than machines.
He leans back, half admires the cut,
Glances at her sleeping, listless, sad,
Eczema’d by human greed and folly.
Then he drapes the garment, intangible as dreams
And gossamer as an escaping thought and sheer as a miniscus
Across her curving form.
Earth bridles, yawns, then shrugs.
And then snuggles and rubs her warming Arctic
Against his mushroom stubble.
“Oh darling!” purrs the planet,
And hugging her Pandemic frock around her, smiles and coos
“My clever virus! This is just divine!”
Elsewhere some low, unhappy creatures
Farmed for fur and fury
And non-consensually essential to High Fashion,
Continue coughing in their crates.