Hatboxes
Les voyages, qui forment la jeunesse, déforment les cartons à chapeaux.
— Rachel
And all the while what we secretly desired
as we stuffed our wardrobes with the most
au courant of overskirts, underdresses,
hoops and panniers, as pop
went the panniers to reveal
a free fall of silk from the empire
bodice, what we lusted
after in our taffetas and brocades
as we puffed our sleeves and huffed them into legs
of mutton, as we watched our waistlines
wobble into place and our big
bell skirts swing, ringing out
curfew and must, what we craved
as we cuffed our sleeves and collared buttons
and pushed them, as elevator hemlines
stuttered at calf and knee and dimple
before going down! again, as we frittered
paychecks on pantyhose and Lycra
spandex and Spanx — our passion
was not to have it all but to have
less, the few easy pieces
to toss into a carry-on, the all-
purpose dress, the wear-with-everything
sandals, the roll-up hat that sports
a certain Slant of brim. Rachel was right
about those broken hatboxes. Every
carpetbag and portmanteau that’s ever
been bumped along a corduroy road is broken
and our jeunesse is gone. We travel lighter
now. At least we work on it. The grown-
up soul looks back, sees her young self lugging
those old hard-sided suitcases with no
wheels but lots of Heft. Sees herself
stashing them deep inside the belly
of a Greyhound headed west. Each suitcase could
have been a house, she was that safe, except
she wasn’t safe, she knows that now. And so,
so lean the soul becomes that it needs nothing
more than motion. It’s what we hunger for,
the dress of flutter and twirl, the shoes of leap
and neverbound, the hat of flounce and spiral.
Dream on. We are unready for that
Distance. Desire pulls us back
to the marketplace, where we engage in self-
deceptive dialogues of stuff and luggage.
I’d bet a farthingale that I could cram
these new peep-toe wedges
into my daypack.