Embroidered Field, and: Passing
- Embroidered Field, and: Passing
Who pulled the floss from the skein and knotted it, choosing among the colors of flowers the colors of these
perfect, impossible asters, flower within flower, corymbs and umbels, stitched in a time, I will, I will not, I will, I will not. Knot.
Who paused, who chose to be quiet in the light of a window, whose skillful, versatile hand laid it in an upstairs room.
Who tore it, who tried to mend. Who took the cloth from the ragbag, who wiped the oily crankshaft, the axle, and then his hand,
adding to these decorous flowers his own scumble and patch. Who found in the abandoned barn
a crumple, stiff with grease and dust, which unfolded into a runner embroidered with flowers, field that was and never was. [End Page 155]
Passing
When was the tree no longer tree and good for nothing but kindling or compost?
Cell by cell by cell things happened in the roots in the twigs in the bark come ice come air come deer in rut fork and poison.
There was tree, green and flowing, then lignin, carbon unmaking itself atom by atom in the hot spring wind, not so much a becoming as a rising of something brittle and eloquent, that was always there like the red of leaves under green.
One kind of season has ended. Stem and root-ball with the clay still clinging to it, the hours spent choosing and planting, all the weeds ever pulled and tossed, blackened slivers of wood, shreds of leaves— into the wheelbarrow with all of them. [End Page 156]
Maura High lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, where she works as a freelance copy editor and translator. She also coordinates controlled burn crews for the North Carolina chapter of the Nature Conservancy and spends as much time as possible out in the woods.
