Clothes Are Words and Words Are Clothes but Who Among Us Contains Lives?

A cape made of undyed

Raw spider silk, country

Butter colored, was shown

At the Victoria

And Albert Museum

Of Design. For three years

Hundreds of weavers worked

To execute the cloth

From silk already spun

By millions of spiders.

You can read about this

In more detail elsewhere.

Here we will note the lengths

You will go to mean clothes.

Jackal, fox, and wildcat

Skins cut from their bearers’

Bones were scraped with bone tools

And worn in Morocco

(What is now Morocco)

One hundred and twenty

Thousand-plus years ago.

Did warmth or ornament

Come first? Just consider

How symbolic the clothes-

Wearing apes are; meaning

Everything has meaning,

With or without function,

And every meaning must

Keep to its own functions,

Lines evolving like lives—

Skirt and shirt words

Once meant the same,

But the Vikings

Pronounced them skirts,

The Saxons shirts,

And words can’t hold

Duplicity

Any more than

Species can share

A single niche.

So Viking skirts

On your bottoms

And Saxon shirts

Up top, although

Your longer shirts

May serve as skirts.