August 2018
Van Hartmann
van.hartmann@gmail.com
NOTE: The suggested theme for this month’s Verse-Virtual submissions, “clothes,” took my thoughts immediately to the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick’s love-poem, “Julia’s Petticoat.”  Herrick’s projection of desire onto Julia’s clothes rather than the woman herself not only raises questions about how clothes become fetish objects but also about the very definition of “clothes” from culture to culture, and the relationship between the clothes, physical or metaphorical, in which we wrap our selves and those selves that they cover or express.  Since I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Crow Indian history and culture for another project, the counterpoint between the focus on clothes in the high Renaissance and the treatment of clothing and personal adornment by native American warriors moved my meditations along accordingly. As often happens in my poetry, my initially playful mediations then took me to an unexpected dark place. 

​In the first poem below, the italicized words are Herrick's.

​FOUR MEDITATIONS ON CLOTHES
​
                        I
 
Julia’s petticoat drove one poet mad,
azure robe, celestial canopy,
flirted transgressively, panted, heaved,
to her thighs so clung, wrote poor Herrick,
who drowned and all but died,
love-sick, lacking Freud,
meditating life eternal
stirring soft beneath a shimmering cloth.
​
                        II
 
Crow warriors rode all but naked,
painted skin the clothes that clung
to frames so perfect French trappers
called them Handsome Men, pompadours
laced with feathers and vision-gifted
medicine, coyote pelt, chickadee, or hawk,
trailing locks like thunderclouds to taunt
pursuing Sioux who fetishized possession of their scalps.
 
                        III
 
Stripped bare, even bald, my people’s clothes
would still be white, magic cloak that covers
sinews, bone, vessels, fluids, flesh we share
with Julia and the Crow, and those
wrapped in lesser cloth, yellow, black, or brown,
our skin white medicine that hoists us
on the sins of history, meditating
life eternal, trailing visions of victims’ ghosts.
 
                        IV
 
I seldom undress completely
​until those hours before dawn when I wake
having shed several suits of armor
into dreams that cling like skin,
tangled shrouds worn bare, not quite death,
but the unwrapping of the day’s dead clothes.
Finally, I sit stripped naked
staring in an empty mirror.                       
© 2018 Van Hartmann
Editor's Note:  If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF