Dressmaker

As a girl I loved fabrics, stitching and moulding them
to fit. I remember a flared dress, pink roses on white.
Wearing it with my first high heels, I tottered past
neighbourhood louts slung on a verandah;
from their transistor
Marty Robbins sang, "A White Sport Coat
and a Pink Carnation'.
As I blushed, they eyed the smoky summer air.
At sixteen,
a slippery silk dress with whorls of red and crimson,
pinched in with a cummerbund. With unswerving hips
I passed the greengrocer, an Italian who sighed, whistled,
called in one sound, his pregnant wife thrusting beans
and tomatoes into brown paper bags; her look touched mine:
wary, beyond challenge, sisterly.
Ten years of illness next,
when I bundled myself inside coats in summer, wore black
as often as not. Hard to stand straight inside a body
so out of kilter.
Since then I have put on the garment
of my womanhood. It marks the curves and leanings
of my flesh, holds in, reveals, what I have come to be,
beyond promise and blight. I know its weight,
its transparency,
its rawness, its flawed smoothness. I wear it now
with something close to ease, with the freedom, almost,
of nakedness.