After Lizzy Gardiner’s The American Express Gold Card Dress

Well, it’s been waiting all these years, like a poem

            asleep in the word-hoard, its prince to come,

kiss at the ready, and bloom it forth to the world:

            or like a kouros, hauled with pain

from the gnarling waters, smiling gaze intact,

            its maker long put out to sea:

or like that ‘orient and immortal wheat’ that waved

            before Traherne, a child bereft,

and set him claiming Paradise again:

            yes, it’s here for the restless heart –

The American Express Gold Card Dress – and all

                        may now be well at last.

The shining dawn Aurora, her name borrowed

            for something cold and massy, gapes

at this, the marvel of our season: thanes

            peer from the smoky meadhall to see

how far the yellow stuff’s come up in the world:

            blundering Midas, his touch deathly,

envies again a thing he cannot finger:

            the Legions’ golden eagle cranes

for a better view of this the latest standard:

            and out on the drumming plains Genghis

puts down his bow and stills the Golden Horde,

                        undone by such a vision.

They’re beating on in some other world, the smiths

            of aureate Byzantium: they’re matching

stone with stone, as once in Ravenna, the keepers

            of golden dreams: they’re setting down,

in memoried Africa, ounce for ounce, the salt

            and its bright bargain: they’re lading ships

in Vera Cruz and Cartagena: they’re panning

            the Klondike and at Poverty Point,

wondering all: and in Corinth Medea,

            designer through and through, is making

that gown of gold which, fitted to her rival,

                        will marry her with death.