I went to a poetry workshop online, and this was one of the poems discussed, by the incomparable Mark Doty. You have it now, even though you didn’t go to the workshop! Sorry to be late with it…but this virus seems to eat time!
Crepe de Chine
These drugstore windows
—one frame in the mile-long film
of lit-up trash and nothing
fronting the avenue, what Balzac called
“the great poem of display”—
are a tableau of huge bottles
of perfume, unbuyable gallons of scent
for women enormous as the movie screens
of my childhood. Spiritual pharmaceuticals
in their deco bottles,
wide-shouldered, flared,
arrayed in their pastel skylines,
their chrome-topped tiers:
a little Manhattan of tinted alcohols.
Only reading their names
—Mme. Rochas, White Shoulders, Crepe de Chine—
and I’m hearing the suss of immense stockings,
whispery static of chiffon stoles
on powdered shoulders,
click of compacts, lisp and soft glide
of blush. And I’m thinking of my wig,
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