Three Ways to a Silk Shirt
Pamela Gillilan (1918-2001)
You have to kill for silk
and it's not easy. Those chrysalides
make themselves so private
in their tight shuttles, so safe
that they can dare to lose themselves
to metamorphosis, abandon the known body
and endure who can imagine what liquidity
before another form takes shape.
They must be murdered in the midst
of miracle, their cerements reeled off,
the long continuous thread saved
pliable, unstained, the severing bit
of the emerging moth forestalled.
The method's suffocation --
the oldest way by baking in hot sun;
but this hardens the thread,
makes unwinding a hard labour,
risks soiling by windbourne dust,
is wasteful.
Steaming's another way -- the plump bolls held
above a boiling cauldron for eight minutes
then for eight weeks spread out to dry
well-aired, so that the corpse in the shroud
desiccates slowly, leaves no stain;
but sometimes the chrysalis survives.
Surest is heated air. A single day exposed
to the technology of fans and ducts, the flow
of arid currents, and the pupa's void,
a juiceless chitin spindle shrivelled back
from the close wrappings drawn and spun
out of its former self -- now to be unwound
and spun again: woven, dyed, cut and sewn,
collared and cuffed.
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