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	poems

The Dress God Wears

I lift your undershirt, musky with sweat
crudely lettered NO WAR, and what comes
is the sudden revelation that it was you
this morning, snarling traffic, leading

it seemed, a river of long, beautiful limbs
and all around you, in that park, history
starting over again in the new lace of almonds
and flowering plums and the white stars of pear

sparring with blue sky, the telephone wires
sagging with sparrows, the college boys
leaning out, yelling Bomb those bastards,
and the sparrows, unsettled then, circling round

and round like a lake of small wings. Though,
finally, forgive me, the world is at war
and all I can do is hold this camisole
over the unsorted laundry, the way at night

sometimes, I leaf through the drawings
you stopped making years ago, trying to decide
which to save, and then one rises up
with the startling truth of all I don’t know

about who you are. Like this shirt
and what it covers: breasts I’ve never touched,
but that floated inside me once, still curled
behind your tiny ribs, and how, for weeks

after you were born, we swam through
the milky predawn hours, chest to chest,
and looking out at me, sometimes your face
seemed a window on The black night house,

You drew years later, explaining This is where
the good light lives, but she is outside
playing now, waiting for her mother,
which is the dress G-d wears, to call her in.

Julia B. Levine