Is there not
in buttons
a kind of immortality?
Time and again
in ancient digs,
it’s buttons and brooches
of bone and bronze
they find:
changeless design.
We never forget familiar fastenings.
Thumb and finger learn
a manual pas de deux –
the push and slip –
to button…and un-button,
instinctively remembering
flat, black discs from the belted gabardine,
prim, stalked baubles, a row along the wrist
of that evening’s satin glove,
slivers of opalescent pearl, like slices of fruit
seeded with four holes, adorning a light chemise,
leather toggles on one week-end’s county tweed,
even the thin, vestigial things once worried on a closed seam.
In buttons,
is there not too
a kind of memory bequeathed?
You, who cherish
gowns and blouses
gleaned from camphor
and dried lavender,
will know
the push and slip,
the loop of time
played on buttons
by fingers before yours.
And know, therefore,
in buttons
immortality in kind.
David Matthews
10th April 2005