McQueen Is Dead. Long Live McQueen.

There were seven colors of mourning, one was lilac. That kind of blossom always has its crowd, fanned out, surrounded by crushing likeness, smell of itself. Fabric has to breathe, at least 2%, like skin. A little milkfat, elastane even in the gravest print. Not knowing how to grieve can poison like a directionless dart. And although fabric has been known to swirl and clasp, be clasped — without mother there’s only art. To hug the body: a swath, anathema, magical, seventies lace and spacedust, all too far gone to truly love. But to twist it, to learn to hate-want. To sway, tear, burrow, be borrowed, everybody’s animal. To float like water seeking its own, stampede like buffalo, seeking its hide. Face painted on torso on horsehair on chesty silk it’s a deathmask for the stigmata slash of the model’s body. • I don’t think I understand what studying is. I listen, I read, I remember, I absorb. I let myself be moved and changed. Is that “studying?” Never five-fingered, you never use them all, gloves will be like hooves, split-footed, hand-stitched. When concept perceived — a womanly gist, let’s say, or a curve of mind — is more than itself (surpassing, all maw) I make it part of me. I take it in, drink a corrosive. I let it overtake me, change everything it can, lip to tip to rim. My eyes just drink the fabric that covers each surface of this world. Suck up the plastic through a polished straw. Everything’s inspiration: trees reflected in windows on buildings, distorted buses endless frames, all too glass, so much lens, textures so tall, and once you start to see things this way, vision’s a performance, shocking and true after all these centuries, a Shakespearean volta, like nectar is poison to the occasional queen bee. Everything actually is blurred, not just how you see. Glasses and shoes are solutions to problems that are real problems, that of blurred world, that of touching the ground. A glass corset for the heart to see out its chest. For without glasses, the eye better sees the wind, by feeling it and closing against its grains, its grasses. For without shoes, my feet become shoes. When I am really feeling, I get very tired, I fall asleep for the seventeenth time on the unfinished skirt of glass eyes and lemon zest hemmed first, grown last. I experience the world as infinite invertedness: no wholes broken, just potential fragments straining, skull-like, at the seams. Anything could give. But no, just takes and takes and takes. • I’ve been trying to write the words, “I cried. Cried really and wetly, and for good.” Old-fashioned writing with intense excitement: the spell of quill and ink spill, quelled. What is beautiful, what is terrifying, what is absurd in me? Every possibility that colors are believable, various, not that mirage I thought I’d seen and can be held apart as unreal, too exterior, distinct from each other wildly as sparks to seaweed or flower to meteor. It collapsed, can’t draw it can’t cut it out of itself. There is no color but what’s already inside the eye, no power or invention or new way to wake up in the morning outside the seeing mechanism, our own orbs. Yet I can’t see myself. I can never see you again. I can only see from inside my skull and when I look down I close everything not just my eyes. I wrap my own tender nether flesh in calfskin leather so buttery, melted back together like so: a newborn softened in its own mother’s milk. • I awoke in a panic (no ma no ma) to the smallest day yet. I dreamed I already dreamed all the dreams I’d get. This morning I dressed in my last dress’s last dress, fit only for a genteel gothic murder, covered up well — airtight, would only fit the stabbed one, after bloodlet. Then, like a glove. Who wears it and where? I will, from the bed to the chair. Headrest, clotheshorse. Designer and model: mutually orbiting the best metaphor for bodiless idea. Amorphous, amorous, amoral, immortal. Red is dead, said blue, to you too? Hindquarter-gauze with silver face clamp and sickened ears pulled, unskulled. Broken backpiece. Shadow sensible by other than sight. To smell a shadow. To strike it. To trace it later, to measure a body by its line. Light’s so quiet. You’d think its cuttings, its edge-hole, those mousy children, would squeak at least a bit. They run like a stocking down the leg of the mind. Why not quieter then? There is no body without life. There is no mind without body. There is no without.