Ode to Clothes

Every morning you wait, clothes, over a chair, to fill yourself with my vanity, my love, my hope, my body. Barely risen from sleep, I relinquish the water, enter your sleeves, my legs look for the hollows of your legs, and so embraced by your indefatigable faithfulness I rise, to tread the grass, enter poetry, consider through the windows, the things, the men, the women, the deeds and the fights go on forming me, go on making me face things working my hands, opening my eyes, using my mouth, and so, clothes, I too go forming you, extending your elbows, snapping your threads, and so your life expands in the image of my life. In the wind you billow and snap as if you were my soul, at bad times you cling to my bones, vacant, for the night, darkness, sleep populate with their phantoms your wings and mine. I wonder if one day a bullet from the enemy will leave you stained with my blood and then you will die with me or one day not quite so dramatic but simple, you will fall ill, clothes, with me, grow old with me, with my body and joined we will enter the earth. Because of this each day I greet you with reverence and then you embrace me and I forget you, because we are one and we will go on facing the wind, in the night, the streets or the fight, a single body, one day, one day, some day, still.