White on White

This poem by Elizabeth Spires is from this week's New Yorker.  I am greatly taken with it. 

The first time I read it, I didn't even realize it is the "nightgown" that is speaking--the speaker felt so utterly human.  The second reading, when I realized the speaker is literally a nightgown, deepened the meaning, and I was in awe of how the personification of a simple piece of clothing yielded such a profound statement about ambivalence. 

The nightgown, which has no head or heart, sees a moment of transcendence so many of us seek (a release from the eternal struggle between head and heart)--a moment that surpasses a need for words, a "white world written on with white writing."

 

NIGHTGOWN

by Elizabeth Spires

To be inhabited.

To float from room

to room raving, waving my arms.

To be tossed by unfamiliar dreams,

and then to lie limp and slack on the bed.

To be folded, without a thought,

and put away in a dark drawer.

Or to hang in a closet, shapeless as a sack,

knowing the terror of form dissolving into formlessness.

         

          Someone is inside me.

          Someone is continually dreaming

          dreams not my own

          so that I am pulled this way and that!

 

I have always been attracted to the moon.

To a place where I shiver but do not freeze.

And although I, unlike you, must make do

without a head or heart, I can imagine a future

you cannot:  where, filled with a wild winter-emptiness,

I fly over a streaming patchwork countryside

to see what has so far eluded me:

the white world written on with white writing!