That one gorgeous. I hadn't seen it before.
I've been enjoying the poet CK Williams recently. Here's a prose poem from his Pulitzer prizewinning book "Rapair":
Invisible Mending
"Three women old as angels, bent as ancient apple trees,
who in a storefront window, with magnifying glasses, needles fine as hair and shining scissors,
parted woof from warp and pruned what wood and human tissue had been sick. Abrasions, rents
and frays, slits and chars and acid splashes, filaments that gave way of their own accord from the
stress of spanning tiny, trifling gaps, but which, in a wounded psyche, make a murderous maze.
Their hands as hard as horn, their eyes as keen as steel, the threads they worked with must have
seemed as thick as ropes on ships, as cables on a crane, but still their heads would lower, their
teeth bare to nip away the raveled ends. Only sometimes would they lift their eyes to yours to
show how much lovelier than these twists of silk and serge the garments of the mind are, yet how
much more benign their implements than mind's procedures of forgiveness and repair. And in your
loneliness you notice how really very gently they take the fabric to its last, with what solicitude
gather up worn edges to be bound, with what severe but kind detachment wield their amputating
shears. Forgiveness and repair." |
