The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Velvet Book by Rae Gouirand

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The Velvet Book

Seering flare for deeper pitch,
flashbulb for sudden ink, stress for disintegration

for the glint that erupts—
dazzle to curse to rupture to rush

changing pulse, simultaneous,
each new to the other. Each a change.

If I vowed I would speak
all words at once. All the speakable words

after a silence as long as all
the unspeakable words lined up one by one like

a line. Words are all words
at once. Silences one word at a time.

At a time is the life of velvet.
I am relentless remembering it,

scribbled across my own pile.
Face or stain I cannot choose. Each learns,

each leans. I am my own body
inside this, finishing. I make myself available

as a hunger would for naming.
Velvet for the structure not the fiber.

The reach of the surface toward
every mote floating. Is it any matter

we say fabric of the time as it blinks,
shakes, shimmers, climbs behind the drapes.

See it there climbing.
Most of the time since its invention

we’ve preferred something else
yet the pull asserts, late August on a plane

a heavy white spine glossed against
the thigh, the start of a dream about cold, about

color, about puncture, about capture
by one unable to look away from the deep

and deepening folds of the coat
saturated ahead of us. Velvet how deep

we soak, how hard we press
the pen, how thoroughly we test

the argument. The whole of it.

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