I just now finished the project that I started that weekend. I can't believe that Buster has been gone for six months. It's maddening to think I'll never, ever see him again. But knitting this blanket has been kind of therapeutic. Somewhere in those 61,000 stitches, you concentrate your loss into the creation of something new, however inadequate.
Blackened Rings
By Virginia Hamilton Adair
Once, to come so far
up tilted prairies to the mile-high
beginning of the barrier peaks
was to cry farewell until death do us join
to all the faces
the little fences of the East.
Between the tears on the homespun blanket
and the deafening silence of the stars
the alder-smoke marked time westward:
each blackened ring spelled sleep.
And the day started with a puff of frost
the sigh and sign of waking.
I came, I saw,
but the conquering took a long time.
Out of the bones of young men
the lodgepole pine;
out of the girl who groaned
entering her final stillness
the alder yielded its bark to the winter deer
branches for lonely fires
and a slight song of leaves.
Now to return is not impossible
the slow wheels having grown wings;
but my blood tells me that the trail ends here
at the vast waters of the sleeping sun.
How should I turn again past death
past life, go down the grainlands
to that narrower sea?
finding the dreams have faces
and the places fences
and myself a mere hovering
spun of some traveler’s frosty breath
he pausing
high on the crest
of one of the great passes
looking for the last time
both east and west.
Just when I think I'm done crying.
ReplyDeleteIt turned out beautiful, and BIG!
Love,
me