Two Poems

In the first piece, dated October 1912, the speaker returns to the work of a weaver after reading a blind poet who saw more wonders than ordinary sight allows. Helen, Penelope, Circe, Calypso, sea nymphs, and fifty enslaved women appear within a vision of purple thread, myth, and finely made fabric.

The meditation asks whether women’s needles correspond to men’s oars, and whether history itself has been woven by objects moving through cloth and waves. Penelope’s shroud becomes a possible covering for humanity at the hour of extinction. To weave, the speaker suggests, may be a way of extending the short length of life given at birth. Writing, too, becomes another kind of weaving.

The second piece, dated May 1913, lingers over the intense light spread across the countryside. The speaker decides to prolong a stay after rediscovering light in its fullest forms, watching dust move through a sunbeam as a passing cloud liquefies it.

Light becomes a kindly form of lodging, a place where people inhabit the slow and fast days they have been given. The piece also invokes the idea of nudity as a Lichtkleid, or “dress of light,” and imagines art as condensed light.