The Millennial Pedestrian

The Merchant

“This rug is Eastern Anatolian, seventy years old,”
the merchant says and offers you another glass of tea.
Topographies lie heaped and gathered at your feet.
You are undone by Earth’s colors,
its slubbed and bumpy texture,
its sudden nighttime blacks and dusky ochres.
Desert dunes cup jade oases,
breakers curl upon a crimson shore.

And in the warp,
the clenched and cloistered anonymity
of women telling tribal tales in wool
whose ancient meanings may have long been lost
or come to mean a different thing. The hands
of Fatima are here, birds there,
a Tree of Life;
geometry of legend into which
forgotten lives are loomed.

Stand with the light just so: there’s the lake
you swam across when you were young.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 30th, 2005.
It's part of the Old Poems category.
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