 |
|||||||
|
|||||||
| DONALD RAWLEY | ||
|
|
||
| Blind Stitch There were women meant to close their eyes for good. I can feel it in silk. How light has its own emotion. It is the blind stitch of yin and yang, Shanghai factories and scarred palms. Fingers with claw thimbles. My mother collected these silks and explained their complexities. That they are outlawed like chipped ivory necklace she still keeps. This I learned was the luxury of pain. I saw it in dusty junk bought in Phoenix in the sixties; rosewood chairs with burst seats, black lacquer bowls of dragons twisting through a lake of cheap gold. It is the voyage passing in an opiate of dark beds behind jade screens, the place we go to for forgetfulness. Here daylight is a baroque gauze and silence is an answer. I opened scrolls of men high in gnarled clouds, drove with my mother south of town where Chinese fields of stock narcissus hidden by walls of oleander swayed in irrigation like silk stretched in the desert. Almost yellow in the sun, these narcissus created a summer whorehouse stink. I learned all lines bend to touch the sky, colors are wealth and the exquisite is never lost; like ivory chrysanthemums falling on yellow shantung, where women kept stitching tiny, crying metal beads until their blindness sang.
|
||
| Duende © 1994, Black Tie Press. All rights reserved. | ||
 |
||
|
Special Tribute Poetry SteamingChateau Marmont Los Angeles Three AM Mulholland Drive Helen in Waiting Jonathan's End American Beauty White Water
|
||
