Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Thong

1.

Behind the mulberry drapes of a woman’s

Room in August is the nave of her body stretched

Across the bed and strewn to her side a thong.

2.

She was her past.

Like the thong

At which three men were pulling.

3.

The thong spoke the soliloquy of her unanimous grief.

It was one part of desire.

4.

A woman and her ruin

Are one.

A woman and her ruin and her thong

Are one.

5.

Or just after.

A thong hides in the sheets,

Smushed detail of a sad beauty someone else invented

For the innuendo of her.

She knows what she prefers.

6.

A vine that spat seeds

Spat them. She climbed

The spiral stairs. A thong

Climbed her.

This synchronicity

Proved her past

And future.

7.

O wild hearts of Belleville,

A postpartum clit is like ever!

Do you not see how like a woman

Who never forgets a thong

Always remembers?

8.

A thong knows how to make an ass

Large in its lack, a clit small in its snag.

But the thong knows, too, that

A woman lives this plot irreproachably.

9.

When the woman had no more clean thongs,

She put on a blue parachute to mark

The end of a life.

10.

At the sight of Stevens,

Some women might run.

Bawds of euphony.

Thongs of euphony.

11.

The poplar trees whorl together

Like the whole of girlhood

In the word panties.

In her bag were six

Thongs. She rode second-class

In a train headed South.

12.

The woman is dancing.

A thong must be gnashing.  

13.

It was August all year.

She was lying across her bed,

And she was going to lie there.

A thong sat

On the nightstand.

Note: This poem, while not entirely sure it would want to say -after Wallace Stevens, is irrevocably indebted to the cultural persuasion of Stevens’ famous text and did amuse itself with the appropriation of certain grammatical and thematic structures evident in his strophes.