Still Lives
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Our son,
fourteen years old and gone.
Silk loom gnarled his hands,
tender stalks trimmed to stumps.
Hands that have loved no woman
but know the cloth
like the lover’s nape
caught midstream in a bath
and slipping effortlessly
under soft-petalled water –
His gelid stare as he left,
one who walks
with no destination,
trained from birth
for the trade
as the tree
bent repeatedly
under brutal winds
knows only to grow
one way.
* * *
The streets are ropes of jute
thick with mud.
In the rugged district
weavers shiver
outside dormitories.
In the slats of sunlight
stolen between shifts,
men smoke on doorsteps,
stoke their anger.
A second storm
is brewing over Croix-Rousse,
they say.
Some squint and glance up the street,
remember themselves
with raised fists
and the National Guard
in clothing red and blazing.
Women rub tired hands
over yellow eyes.
When we strike again,
let them come.
More fire for the furnace of hatred
that broils, this season.
In airless rooms
the colours spin on, and beautifully.
Merchants from Versailles command them
from the bent-backed child’s fingers,
a small figure braiding
yellows that set the sallow walls alight.
Rose tendrils climb
the trellis of the loom
as an old man
bleeds into a brocade
for some clergyman’s sitting-room in Vienna –
In the Saône, the dyes run green
as if new gods
have spilled their blood,
and blue, from the tears of fishes.
* * *
Monsieur Michel takes the bundle
from my hands
and pays us his pittance.
The merchant’s eyes, round as black sous
take in the redness of my hands,
the darkness of the room
in which we work and live,
the slow fire of the loom
burning our thoughts
to crimson ends.
Our children
learn the spectrum’s slide
from red to mauve
before they know words.
We pluck patterns like birds
from the air
and fasten them with strings.
Beneath the city’s
damp belly we tunnel,
sheltering our bright burdens
from the teeth of rain,
the bleaching sun.
Silk has the look of skin.
It is a live thing,
stolen threads that remember
a living worm
in its dying chamber,
a loose-fitting cloak
passed from moths to kings.
It has the curves of a body,
the weight of a sleeping child.
We are crushed beneath its folds,
yet it passes like water
out of our hands.
* * *
A riot of leaves
blows across the courtyard,
wind’s fingers
brush the backs of our hands
while we wait in this stillness.
Across the city
the looms are abandoned
like dishes after a banquet
of blood and dye.
The young men stream
like mice from the darkness,
soon to erupt
in the streets.
In the Vieux Ville,
horses’ hooves dance metallic
over cobblestones,
silver-bitten grey
gleaming church steps.
The sandstone face
of St. Jean’s Cathedral,
burnt clay of a doorway,
a shopkeeper on Rue de la Juiverie
keeping time with his broom.
The tinkling bells of a door open:
brown shoes scuffle in,
silver coins are exchanged
for a loaf of bread, a sack of flour.
A flea-bitten dog outside St. Paul’s
battles flies with his grey ears.
These are the colours of the day.
We drink them heavily
like sweet brown tea
these few hours
before the marshals
and the blockades
and the shrieking colours
that beg to be woven.
There are spaces we make for ourselves
between shadow and sunlight,
rare threads pulled
from the skein of darkness.
When your fingers sift
through the loose strands
of my hair
and clothing falls from us
like dead sheaves, revealing
the living fibre of the skin,
I know this is the light
we must choose to live by.
Even the night enfolds our bodies
in its finest silken sheets. 
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