Self-portrait as Thousandfurs by Stacy Gnall

To have been age enough.
To have been leg enough.
Been enough bold.  Said no.
Been a girl grown into that
negative construction.  Or said yes
on condition of a dress.  To be yours
if my skirts skimmed the floors.
To have demanded each seam
celestial, appealed for planetary pleats.
And when you saw the sun a sequin,
the moon a button shaped from glass,
and in the stars a pattern
for a dress, when the commission
proved too minute, and the frocks
hung before me like hosts,
to have stood then at the edge
of the wood, heard a hound’s bark
and my heart hark in return.
To have seen asylum in the scruffs
of neck—mink, lynx, ocelot, fox,
Kodiak, ermine, wolf—felt a claw
curve over my sorrow then.  Said yes
on condition of a dress.  To be yours
if my skirts skimmed the floors.
To have demanded each seam
just short of breathing, my mouth
a-beg for bestial pleats.
And when you saw tails as tassels,
underskins sateen, and in entrails
damasks of flowers and fruit,
when the bet proved not too broad
for you, and before me, the cloak held
open as a boast, to have slipped
into that primitive skin.  To have
turned my how how into a howl.  To have
picked up my heavy hem and run.

----------

[first read on the Academy of American Poets; available for free online]