Читать книгу I Love Artists - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge - Страница 11

The Constellation Quilt

She stitched her story on black

silk patches from the mourning dress, quaint

as our novels will seem, but we still recognize

tonight's sky, as if there were a pattern

whose edges compose with distance, like nebulae

or namings, so triangles become Orion

Horse, Morning Star, not flanks and wings imagined

in gases, or story pieced out of intervals

from which any might grow, as if sparks ever

scatter the same, or a name assume one face

and stance, dated in cross-stitch in a corner

Stitching a name like defoliate in white thread

on white fabric leaves the leaf empty. In that

century, it was a giraffe or a bear's act. Sometimes

the only pattern seems shock waves advancing

in parallel fanned lines, leaving a tide's debris

whose pattern is moon, cryptic as if there were none

the one safe assumption. Littlest sisters eclipsed

are each another story of a marriage, using the same

scraps for different constellations, Bear, Swan

overlapping.