Old Clothes

my old clothes don’t fit anymore

I try them on again, sometimes, to see
if they flatter me still- there are days
that they do, jarring as a flower
in the dregs of a nuclear ruin, and days that they don’t- I feel like oil on a black
road, all thin-film and refraction:
this dress I hoard, another given away
making room for someone-
something – else; it still smells of a club where I hung up my dreams
in the cloakroom like an old sou’wester
I was shared lipstick and soliloquy then with my forehead bare and my temper on my sleeve, falling as fast and hard
as Hilda for Ezra, and always having
the duds to show for it, moth-gnawed,
threadbare, fallen to holes,
I’ll go naked before I wear them again

my old clothes don’t fit anymore

wearing them is like trying to find sentiment in a dead man’s shoes
or good light in a room I slept in
a childhood ago, but now is all jumble
and dust- I can clap my soles clean, throw open a window to yawning day and still feel tight around my chest where I’ve outgrown the wardrobe
I used keep, pastels outwashed
to a colourless hue by the sallow of my cheek- in sheer dark and velvet I breathe perfume on a shawl my mother
gave me, rolling a laugh like Joyce’s Molly, eat too much and too little
til only my coat fits right, old faithful
had I not lost the buttons to the hood;
I let the wind kiss my neck like a lover
I’d never take back again