Thursday, October 25, 2012

The Love Dress

My nine blog followers turned into 33 while I was sleeping.  This is the post I have been wanted to lay down for weeks, but houseguests, students, a wedding with rehearsal, two feasts, a hotel stay, and then teaching and sewing PoemHolders like crazy for the Recycle Santa Fe Arts market have stifled my blogness.

So here it is.  The Story of the Love Dress. At the end of my Ghost Ranch week, Poetry Alchemy with ten totally bright and shining writers, we soaked at Ojo Caliente and then dined at Abiquiu Inn.  We had to check out the gift shop at the Inn and I came in to see Karen modeling a dress the others encouraged her to try on.  Karen is from Montana, lives in a log house, but spends some months each year in Scottsdale where her husband sells his ironwork.  We all loved and approved of the dress which fit her very fit body like a glove.  We wanted her to buy it.  It costs a small fortune.  $275 dollars.  I mean, who could?
Here she is in the gift shop.
We drove off , the dress giving off an audible sigh on its hanger.

In the morning we all still could see Karen in her dress.  I had the end of week, wild idea that we should scholarship the dress, give the dress a home, send it to Scottsdale on Karen.  Everybody chipped in and Karen never said, "Oh no, you shouldn't. I mean I couldn't accept."  She just smiled and received. She and Margo went back to the Inn and purchased the dress.  It became known as The Love Dress, since the group love supplied the financial energy to send this beauty where it belonged.
Karen wore it to our final class reading and I read my poem, "Dressing Down for Love," to accompany the outfit.  Afterwards we all talked about the gift of the dress to all of us. We got a story.  We saw graceful receiving of a gift. We sent that dress to Montana where it resides until the drive to Arizona this winter.
Here she is again, on her log cabin's porch, glowing.  Here's my poem which also shines a bit more thanks to the Poetry Alchemy we enacted, embodied, and dressed up in style.



Dressing Down for Love

Put on your love dress.
Take off your other garments
the ones that cost you most.
Wear your heart our.
Become a transvestite
for love. Dress as a heart.
Establish a municipality
with eyes you meet on the street.
Enter the election for Darling.
Let kindness reign. Put on
no airs. Be plain as feet           
which also may carry you away
along the Love Highway.
Hello. What is your name?
I have forgotten. Remind me.