ManicDDaily

DVerse Poets Pub has a lovely prompt today, hosted by Victoria C. Slotto, broadly based on quilting, the fabric of one’s life, as a means of self-expression, art, beauty (as well as warmth).   My poem below is about a blind relative who actually made the rug depicted above.  (Please note that the poem itself is fictional!  Also that it’s a draft!   (NOTE – December 13–I’ve done a revised version of the poem below which may be found here.)

Against the weave

The convulsive flicker
could just hook onto the gap
between white and black but
other spectral shifts–
cadmium to indigo to green–
could not be seen, nor shapes–
except for looming or not there–so
he chose his shades by smell mainly: some washed
with the saltiness of fresh ham, others imbued with a slight
must, a corner of the
barn where the planks rotted.
An occasional skein smelled
new mown while another whispered of water
silken with suds.  Others
he could barely stand to sniff, their acrid
sharpness testifying to strong dyes, the warp
of a fresh uniform–he remembered
when his brothers had gotten
away–or even the diluted stink
of slaughtering pen.

There were colored yarns too and webs
of cloth that he twisted before weaving–
their original patterns–the chintz or pink
geometry–converted on his cellar loom to
a knotted crisscross, stripes
that would hold up to years
of sun or shadow, feet and floor.

His shirt was always buttoned
to the chin, belt loops puckered,
eyelids fluttering beneath a pale high
forehead that seemed, nonetheless, compressed
as if trying hard to focus all
that could not be seen.
But meeting him one would look
at the large knuckled hands (turning
from eyes, forehead).  Hard to realize from their
stiff dangle how fast they could
weave.  For he got
very good at it, one past-time
allowed a blind man
when sons were meant to plow
straight furrows.

(P.S. – I am also submitting this poem for Gooseberry’s poetry picnic.)