Seams, running: as callused fingers spurn
invitations from an open window. French
knots and ears of wheat, fleurs-de-lis,
slip knots; blind stitches for the veil
a bride might wear at a wedding. Slant,
uneven, overcast; picked, pricked, tailor-
tacked; featherstitched and darned.
Work on the willow’s whips of tiny
chain-stitched leaves, the peacock’s many
jade and sapphire eyes. Smooth the heated
iron across the sleeves and bodice, but leave
one end untucked. Careful not to spill
the smell of burning plastic on the breeze.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
Gorgeously evocative, Luisa, of the stitching of our wedded lives (the gown in which we are wedded to life ultimately, perhaps) in the stitching of the gown of the natural world (fleurs-de-lis, wheat, willow’s whips of tiny /chain-stitched leaves) and the harsh discordant entry to the ‘untucked’ end… ‘burning plastic.’
I had a feeling that you might say something about the poem if you read it. Come to think of it, I still had that chemical smell in my mind from our little exchange on cloth/fabric stores recently on Google+ …
As Brenda said, very evocative imagery, Luisa.
Thanks, Larry!