First, many thanks for your kind words about these poems about fashion on the blog this week. FB will be back refreshed next Monday with the regular collection of tips, sightings, and styling info about vintage fashion.
Today's poem, by Andrew Motion, is about the mundane occurance of misplacing one's things. Yet is there not something more forensic in the image of gloves lying crumpled in the yellow glare of a sodium streetlamp . . .
Red Gloves
Reaching the restaurant late
I find the empty shells
of your gloves on the cold curb:
stretchy, crushed red velvet
which slithered off your lap
to float in the sodium stream.
What could they mean except
you have arrived before me
and taken your place already?
The things we forget, or or lose,
live in a heaven of debris,
waiting for us to collect them;
already your naked hands
are fluttering over the table
missing they don’t know what.
Andrew Motion
(crocheted gloves here at eBay; poem from the anthology Out of Fashion, by Carol Ann Duffy, ed., Faber and Faber, 2004)
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I am fascinated and delighted by the poetic tangent you have taken this week. This poem and the one about hats are my favourites - so far. Clever Carol Duffy to have collected this anthology which I'm ashamed to admit I had not heard of before, although I am familiar with many of the poets represented. (She's a great choice for Poet Laureate.) I shall now buy this book with its so appropriate title which has many resonances with my own life and current occupation. Thank you Christa.
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