Arms And The Dress Poem by gershon hepner

The most beautiful clothes that dress
a woman are the arms
of lovers who can guess
her naked, unchaste charms.
Arms of the man I sing
when I embrace her thus,
each time I have a fling,
and take, without much fuss,
the liberty of dressing
a woman with my hands,
when my arms are caressing
her wet, lascivious lands.

Inspired by an article by Steven Erlanger on the funeral of Yves Saint Laurent (“France Mourns and Celebrates the Ultimate Couturier, ” NYT, June 6,2008) , as well as by another poem I wrote today called “Edna’s Wetlands”) :
Two shopgirls in their uniform red jackets and black blouses stared down from the windows above the Elena Miro shop on the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré on Thursday, as the fashion world gathered below to mourn Yves Saint Laurent. Elena Miro is across the narrow street, blocked by the police, from the St.-Roch Church, sometimes considered “the church of artists, ” because it contains the graves of Corneille and the landscape architect André Le Nôtre. There, the world of French power and glitter held funeral services on Thursday for Mr. Saint Laurent, who was generally regarded, as the daily newspaper Le Figaro called him, the finest fashion designer of the last half of the 20th century. He rarely if ever designed for the women who buy at Elena Miro, which sells clothes for what is gently termed full-figured women. But he was considered a liberator of women, making trousers both fashionable and acceptable, and it was largely the women of Paris who lined the streets behind the police to mourn Mr. Saint Laurent and who stood to watch the big screen that showed the funeral going on inside. They clapped as Mr. Saint Laurent’s plain oak coffin entered the church, and again,90 minutes later, when it left, this time covered with the flag of France. “The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves, ” he once said. “But for those who haven’t had the good fortune of finding this happiness, I am there.” He died Sunday, at 71, of a brain tumor, after an enormously creative and tumultuous life, which was also marked by psychological fragility and drug abuse…. Mr. Saint Laurent, born in Oran, Algeria, will be cremated and his ashes buried in a botanical garden he restored in Marrakesh, Morocco, near a home he and Mr. Bergé bought together. Mr. Bergé said he would mark Mr. Saint Laurent’s grave with the words “French couturier.” “French because you could have been nothing else, ” he said. “French like a verse of Ronsard, a parterre of Le Nôtre, a page of Ravel, a painting of Matisse.”

6/6/08