We Wore Dresses opens with the title poem. The dresses in the lines of poetry are both beautiful and restrictive: “In dresses we were careful, won few scars or bruises / collected even fewer tales of swift licks, shattered bones” and “We were flowers: angel trumpets, fuchsia, inverted tulips . . . How exquisite we felt” (1). This tension permeates the book, weaving the joys and beauties of womanhood with the strictures that can accompany it. The tension is gentle, however; the overall feeling I was left with when I closed the collection’s pages was one of reflection of a well-lived life, rife with complications and imperfections but also joy.
The flower imagery in “We Wore Dresses” is continued in “Girls’ Gym:” “Oh, how we blossom / in our allotted little plots! / So modestly we blossom” (6). As Bushman-Carlton’s poems trace early life, there’s a sense of forced reserve, barricading unsanctioned passion. In “Desire,” the narrator reminisces about adolescence and the assumption of youth teachers that girls aren’t susceptible to desire, “even though we reek of it, even though it oils the fasteners of our necklaces, / stains the buttons of our blouses, / skids on our shoes to dances in church parking lots” (8). “Waiting” observes a father and his children, indulging in a milkshake while his children watch hungrily. Even when marriage approaches, the narrator speaks of restraint: “always wanting more, but settling / for tonguing an ear,” and “scrambl[ing] to finesse her words” as partnership negotiations are discussed (18). The narrator has desires, and she wants to articulate them, but something holds her back.
As the poems follow the curve of life’s progression, the author writes more of the push and pull between desire and restraint. She wonders if she’s lost her identity in “My Maiden Name.” “How easily I let it go . . . Who could find me now? Who would need to?” (41). That final plea, Who would need to? asks another question beneath those printed on the page: Does a wife fold into her husband once they are sealed together, committed to cleave to one another?
Bushman-Carlton’s language is often simple and clear, but tucked in among the poems are bits of imagery that sing. In “Hair Narratives,” music forms an overarching metaphor for a father braiding his daughter’s hair: “a sonata of filaments;” “wispy strands stray, vibrating;” “the strings can sing, stir and swirl / lighter than the air into which they tremble” (44-5). This gift is especially present in the poems that describe nature: “Starlings / unbundle, marginis dissolve” (“Murmuration,” 97). “Clouds meander over the cola-colored sky” (“Lingering,” 105). But in other poems, the simplest statements carry moving impact: “When in medical school, Alisa told me / how she and the other students had to learn to touch” (66).
Towards the end of We Wore Dresses, Bushman-Carlton offers a poem in counterpoint to her opening verses. “The Granddaughters Wear My Clothes” paints a scene of the narrator’s granddaughters choosing from among her old clothes, “those that no longer flatter / my body of balsa bone.” These descendants leave “unapologetically what they don’t want / folded on my bed and closet floor,” seemingly less bound by the obligation to perform femininity in a prescribed way. They wear the narrator’s clothes in different ways: “my leopard print blouse with the tails knotted / above a bare torso, my jeans newly-ripped and shimmied low.” There is no resentment with this added freedom. “What pleasure to see my carefully-chosen garments articulated by bodies / of climbers, dancers, swimmers . . . I’ve no self-pity for this aging body that’s had its run” (107). The narrator offers up her beautiful things with gladness and grace, indicating her life has had such fullness that she has an abundance to give.
