When she flew home, she left her cloak. I try it on. As disguise, or to take her role on? She cut quite a figure in our town: power, renown. Odd pocket-sleeve at the throat: a hood for her foot- long neck and slender head--not human at all. Now I recall that face--a swan-neck feathered saur, less beaky (but quite as quick-strike snaky) as any Terran heron. The hood wards off an alien wizard hazard, one that friends all warned I'll need some shelter from. But as I read the pamphlet (for sheltercloaks come manualed) I learn these sorcerers hit aliens alone. I needn't jam my fat Earth head into her hood; I'm good. Well, nearly. Cape's too small for me--can't pull off her flowing glide. She was half a meter shorter than bony me. Only if I kneel doth cape grace-drape. Oh, what if I just stand up human-tall-- just call cloak a minidress! I long to acquire some gravitas, but why copycat, in my hunger to change, her unique, inherent strange?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

Dreamed twice. In the first I saw only the hooded cape and recalled the alien woman. In the second I saw her in the hood, then they fused; and this was the dream where I learned I didn't need to jam into that narrow hood or hunch to mimic her shortness.

So what WAS this bird-woman-coat-alien? A spiritual stance, a way of being, an "assemblage point" as Castaneda calls it? Or a external entity I encountered--a dream-spook so strange I struggled to see it clearly, interpreted it as person one second, laundry the next?

On waking I recalled the refrain of Yeats's poem Apparitions:

It/she sure felt like that. A Material Girl indeed! Cloth, then spirit, then featherflesh, then...

So what's it mean, this Fashion Apparition? 25 years later, I'm still unsure. All I do get is...

I thought I needed some kind of exotic armor or disguise--and was firmly shown I didn't.

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