Alive in a brown stucco house picketed by thorns of a barberry hedge (in fall their berries spattered red as a smashed Christmas ball) she sat at the front window in a horsehair rocker sleek as the bottoms of her pots and pans. She hated as she dug the needle into the widening pattern of the quilt - a patchwork of her deciduous dresses radiating from the center of satin, white stone cast first. The memories of material spread their circles around it. A swatch of evening dress never worn. A rectangle of the coat she made herself. She pinned them and pierced them, fettering the failures together with a tense silk thread, cross stitch, blanket stitch, chain stitch, her embroidery precise as the steel shaft. When the design was updated by the lining of her worn-out suit, she smoothed the quilt across their bed. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE WHITE WITCH by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON CHAMBER MUSIC: 13 by JAMES JOYCE AN ETERNITY by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH CHAMBER THICKET by SHARON OLDS THE WRECK OF THE CIRCUS TRAIN by HAYDEN CARRUTH EVERYBODY KNOWS by DAVID IGNATOW |