The dress of one occasion in its box
Belongs to yesterday and to tomorrow—
But not to this day slowly turning yellow,
For better or worse, among the cotton flocks.

Disembodied now and ghostly pale,
Mummified in tissue easily torn
As though the flimsy pattern of a dress,
It’s packed away—for what, you cannot guess—

Stored perhaps for someone not yet born
(You cannot see the face behind the veil)
The day of its occasion growing stale
And brittle as a triangle of cake—

Most innocent and decadent of frocks
Because solemn and frivolous—the fluff
That blows away from dandelion clocks,
The lace of time, that shifty, subtle stuff

That only time itself knows how to make
Out of the body’s loom, the velvet marrow.
One Saturday in May, you thought the blue
Above your heads was yours to keep and new,

When really it was something old, to borrow.