The Big White Dress

By: Lisa Rosenberg

I will sew you a self
of moon-cloth
color of angels

and aristocracy.
The shape will buoy you
till your head is an icon,

your hands twin flame
above the weeping guests.
What are nebulae

to this radiance?
The big white dress
floats up it knows

the clouds are its
correspondance,
the sky its bed.

I let it go,
work of a hundred hands
from a hundred ages.

Draping and tatting,
forbidden stitch,
our eyes made dim by it,

our spines bent
over lace, a thread loop,
such frailty -

like a huge bell of chalk,
made only to marvel at.
All we know is beaded

in clusters and strung
on the spidery lines
between motifs,

and we ask nothing.
We do not ask
for the bloodspot,

for innocence blind
as a sheet, for shy
obeisance.

The linen is
laid for your path
sheer as a blaze.

The dress incarnates a day,
the day we are trained for.
There is a song

at the end of it,
there is ascension.
Even your hair

will flower
and your pupils reflect
the mass of corollas you clasp.