The Empty Loom: Poems

AT THE HALL OF AMERICIAN INDIANS IN THE CARNEGIE MUSEUM

THE EMPTY LOOM i. Hiking through the Lake District, you watched sheep Graze among the evening hills like a dusky, curdShaped cumulus. Looms weave such clouds as these. ii. In his Il Libro dell’ Arte, Cennini wrote that women Took up spinning after squandered Paradise, But surely he was also thinking of the roundness To their rhythms in the soft Italian nights, the moon, Pale bobbin, coming on . . . iii. I’m sure he would have loved the simple buoyancy Of these heddles, the warping board, and the way The wood looks like it could burn even under water. Have loved the sight of you in evening light, seated By the window, inching your patient fabric past the edge Of the fell where the patterns gathered into cloth. 43 AT THE HALL OF AMERICIAN INDIANS IN THE CARNEGIE MUSEUM 1. Ghost Dance Shirt Pressed surplice, the color of the cover of a drum, Of the Drying Grass Moon, fringed and cryptic, Millenarian, Sioux. They wore them believing, The feathers, the rainbows flashing at their sleeves, Red stars spangling the yokes. Shirts like this one Patterned from a dream: talismans against the guns Of the Bluecoats, they were told. At Wounded Knee The stiff, shirted bodies lay dead in the snow. 2. Sky Chart A room like an earth lodge, round and domed. In here, where the hooped heavens slowly wheel, The Dark God flings his stars upon the ceiling— Time, seasons, passages on the earth all charted, Down to the last crystal in the southern sky. During the first rounds of radiation you loved To sit here, quietly healing into the constellations. The last one you saw they called Awaits the Dawn. 44 3. Rattle Because, as you’d read, the rhythms come from it, The Star Company’s rattle is circled like the sun, All the elements of the vast world fashioned there. I can still hear you listing them for our young sons: Wood, pebbles, paint, Sage Grouse tail feathers, Great Horned Owl body and wing feathers— Tracing each back to the rattle—rawhide, tanned hide, Sinew, dye . . . as if the list might go on forever. 4. Baskets From the roots of Western red cedar and Sitka spruce, From the cinched, rolled coils of the yucca, Handled or lidded, platter or canister or bin, And gradient, woven to weights and measures . . . You made yours from pine needles and raffia, Patterned with dyes you strained from pokeberries, The obsidian waters in which walnuts had soaked, And from the blood where you’d stabbed your thumb. When they were young, you told our sons that death Meant changing into something light-filled, like a tree, The blown wings swirling from it, or a raft Like a basket, cinched tautly to carry us across. 45 ...