The Spinnery
It may as well be sorcery,
how she moves
from bleating sheep
to fair isle mittens,
through centrifuge and steam,
threshing and winding.
It’s the skeins still
deep with the colors
that floated off at shearing
onto the barn floor—
granite, caramel, rust, cloud—
that call me.
But it’s children we discuss.
I am there to find
the root of the next hat
I will knit for my son,
who loses them weekly.
The cloud that followed me in
was the shape of worry
over the particular shade of
purple
his lips will turn
with snow on the air,
whether it is tolerable,
whether it will make him stronger
or do him in.
I have one of those,
she says.
A dreamer.
Jumping trains.
I don’t know where she is
for years at a time.
She makes it a point
to catch my eye:
to catch my eye:
But, you know, they don’t belong to us anyway.
And I laugh,
remembering Frida
who loved to laugh,
who loved to laugh,
with the barbaric steel in
her spine.
Tragedy, she once said,
is the most ridiculous thing.
