Archive > Vol. 19 no. 1

Kate Farrell

The Costume

I once went to a costume party as Wallace
Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” —
a notion that arose in my local Salvation Army
thrift store via a translucent dusk-blue silk-chiffon
dress. A floor-length thirties-era garment that
hung lightly from the sales rack with a matching
opaque slip and a hand-penned price tag
of three dollars and ninety-nine cents.

Back in my apartment, I wrote the lines of
the poem, or as many as would fit, with invisible
glue on the dress, front and back, neckline to hem.
When sprinkled with glitter, the words came
into view, shimmering like the surf that lapped
the twilit seashore where the woman in
the poem walked along singing. The costume

party was loud and crowded. “Who are you
dressed as?” a guest would shout above the clamor.
“The Idea of Order at Key West!” I’d yell back.
A lark, in part, but the real pull was

to wear the blue air of a poem I loved
and something of the glimmer of its darkening
port, the atmosphere of its ruminations,
its state of mind and sense of the world. It was also
the most beautiful thing I ever wore.

Even so, I was almost not sorry to get it
back from the cleaners a few days after the party
and find that every speck of glue and glitter,
every word and line, was gone. As at

the end of the poem, after the song is
over and the singer’s spellbound listeners
head back to town; past the boats, glassy portals
and stars in the water. The coast, once

more a dusk-blue swathe of wind
and surf and thrift shop chiffon, a mystery
with a price tag in a Cornell box.