At the Museum of Women I saw:
The “Clothing Collection:” Silk and satin traces. Women
history The City. Centuries-old skirts and dresses; Summer
frocks of decades past. Wardrobes. Fashion. Chic aged to
antique. Pinned to every skirt dress blouse a brief
descriptive card: Year, value. Year, value.
Clothing once alive with women, once women-animated
clothes. Once women of The City. Anticipating nights,
inhaling cricket air of parks and gardens. Exhale. City
engine of oblivion. Gone lithe beauties, gone buxom matrons
cherished secrets of their own. Once moments lived, once
birth to ash. Once striving, music of their day days women
of The City.
“Memoir Exhibit:” Journals, diaries, letters, postcards,
notebooks under glass. Read private prose: letters to
lovers, friends. Lock of hair from a famous poetess – age
seventeen two hundred years ago – clipped, sent to her beau.
Light brown flecked with gold alive as if sheared off a
teenager just yesterday.
“Photograph:” Moments of women living City lives.
Dressing, undressing, walking, talking, working, loving.
What thoughts thought before the flash and shutter-wink of
lens-time, before death left only ghost-shadows to ponder?
Other Exhibits: “Women at Home;” “Women at Work;” “Women’s
Gardens:” profound relationships with plants and herbs.
I left the place aroused, exhausted, yearning.
My head spun images of women.