For all those blasting by at sixty-something
on that two-lane to Scio, she’d have been
a chance look to the left as their chrome
flashed—slight, gray-haired woman
sitting in the front window of a small house,
head bowed to the pattern
she was winding her yarn through. On one side,
a box her caregivers kept dropping
spools of all colors into, and on the other, another
filling for twelve years with doilies. No longer able
to sow her garden with rows of corn and beans,
all through her nineties, every day but Sabbath,
there she sat, sometimes getting a honk
and wave. Any who stopped left with stacks
of doilies balanced in their arms to keep
and to pass on to friends or neighbors.
No one asked her to make them,
nor did anyone ever say, Love that much,
like light greened by leaves and streams
interlaced, Love. Any in need, which was all,
always, she took into her wiry arms
and squeezed. I just love you so much!
She had no curses to give for a life of working
fuel pumps and fields, raising her two
red-haired boys, or even the time Charlie in a tractor
loaded with carrots backed over her foot.
No one knows how many doilies she made.
As long as breath moved blood and bone,
she wove the way she prayed. From Marion
to Harrisburg, there must be thousands
stuffed into cupboards. From one person
to the next, into hospice homes and through
churches, they made their way around the world,
one even pinned to a wall in Turkey, says Loyd.
Of the many I have, I’ve never put one to use
to hold a hot plate or vase, like this one,
this bicolored hexagon of triangles
making green and violet stars in my hands.
Of all the strands my great aunt left, I’m one
who can’t build or wire the way my cousins can.
I remember, though, resting my hand
on her head as she sits in rainy light, threading
my fingers through her hair like mist
as wisps of her grace thread through this.
