Two Poems

The Loomhouses

Because of this almost scurvifying lack of light. No matter
if the phrase embodies the wrong vitamin. Just give me wall-length panes
and an earthen floor. “Light-bearing interfaces.” Windows will be called this down
the line. A light-expanding whitewashed interior. Four rush bottom chairs
and a bobbin wheel. Filaments plucked, like vermicelli from the vats,
ten neighbourhoods in length. Loom as air-zither. With a pail for tipping under the frame
for humidity’s sake. And then a crock of oaten cakes. A stack of creels. Give
me my foot-a-bouncing on the treadle. Give me the worms. The way they move
one segment at a time. The gnarled and puffed-up rhizomes.
Shucked out with boiling. Galoons. Gros de Naples. This scarf. Such brocade
denies the worm its mothdom. Never to put out horns beyond the cloth.

An empress drinks tea beneath a mulberry tree and into her cup will plop
a single fibrous eider-coloured bundle. She’ll know instinctively to use
the fished-out threads, the life I plump for now in spite of the hike to Red Bank
with the wallet and back. For I’ll take this over any factory. Cloth-in-the-ears;
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