(News: The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make)
Empress Josephine rushed
to hold this air-like cloth
wrap it flowing as if water
and cinch the fall as dew drops
under her breasts
Those folds of Dhaka muslin strands
(said woven by fingers of ghosts in mist)
brought on howls of lust, raised eyebrows
shredded airs and graces and rustled
with its transparent specialness
The wild snowy-floret bushes ⸺
fickle and flimsy knots fixed by
those who twisted cotton clouds ⸺
young eyes who knew how to link the
tiny, tiny joins ⸺ and its nuances
between imagination and memory
now obsolete as thought blossoms
So wondrous, fine and illusory, copyists
cannot come close to the thread count
What was a sort of mental library
of how to make it, cannot be read
This risqué transparent irresistible best friend
of Josephine and queens
might never have existed
Like the ghosts thought to be the weavers
they and it vanished when profiteers
kissed away homespun treadlers
Their Bangladeshi heritage spun over a year
into the finest silkiest softest gossamer
is gone in regret as much as love letters lost
because the throwaway everyday masses
wished for speed
Unresurrected, trickier than appreciated
the valuable fabric that gave the appearance
of naked, even in ancient Greece,
has beaten machines
The lacuna of its shadow is blurred in rarity
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