Goldstein's Drapery
Fabric stacks like sediment at Rosa Goldstein's.
You can riffle through decades of warp, weft,
texture and design, pausing in the fifties
say, at coarse linen geometrics in cream and green,
to visualise the artifacts: Starlet, bouffons,
saucer buttons stitched in cats' teeth
to yellow card, Nouveaute de Paris
in elegant cursive; diagonal roses, dogs,
Eiffel Towers on acetate scarf scenarios.
On any level, the archeological browser
may sideslip through another mode- such as
the twenties, Gossamer Brassieres conferring
'Maiden form and freedom'; waists and morals
low, truculent legs licked behind shapeless voile.
Women came out in slacks. On the radiogram
Rosa listened to jazz and crackling optimism;
in Britain, striking coolies became Churchill's
first enemy. In pride of place, a Dior New Look claims
the window mannequin, all petticoats and flare
and clinched waists after square wartime austerity.
A-lines, hairbands, the strata of sixty-three
and Jacky Kennedy, frozen by the moment,
who will remain true to the style of that day
for the rest of her life; like old women
who age in the hats they were young and wooed under.
Milliners don't design for the dying,
there's no need. those dusty old hydrangeas
in congregations and on buses, were young once too.
Think of those who die in their wedding dresses,
faithful to the memory of how they saw themselves best.
The good minute for the hour.
Rosa Goldstein behind pre-drip-dry ginghams
has never measured beginnings and ends.
That a bolt of amethyst moire sits beneath
turquoise acetate on the shelf, is an index
of colour, exquisite textural difference
rather than historical progression.
Her skin, breathing Oil of Ulan at the wrists
and neck, is as smooth as the inside of a shell.
Her lapis eyes are clear. Her vision is of
crepe suits that queue close on a chrome rack,
intent on one another's lapels. The new old.
Boxes of dormant lingerie wiating to be held
shivering to the light, polished stockings
and a mess of elastic suspenders on the pine counter.
That is close up. In the distance, Rosa sees
shot colour merge into plaid and check
and stippled shade like an unselvedged sky,
and the sense within her of the new
coming on to the new on to the new.
