Tapestry Fragments: Another Thread

Image from MINE ENEMY GROWS OLDER: Dougals-Cushion.
Prose by Rick Mobbs.
Gently rearranged by Glenn Buttkus


Rick Mobbs wrote a long and wonderful piece of narrative prose, "tapestry fragments" a few weeks ago. I extracted the end of it, and morphed it into poetry. Returning to the Mobbsian well of creativity, I took out the middle of the piece, the beating heart; which somehow stands on its own, out of the chest of the prose, throbbing on its own, a wholeness to itself:

Tapestry Fragments: Another Thread

And yet
in the tapestry
there was much
that was wayward
and unpredictable;
for along with everyday cruelty,
everyday kindness acted,
and observed.

My attention was drawn
to a strangely highlighted
moment.
In the texture
of the time,
Christ
the fulcrum emerges.

Merciless onlookers
grow quiet.
Little by little,
does the world move
toward the good?
Or do we simply
turn our faces,
now to light,
now to insanity
and darkness?

Are the shifting half-lights
misunderstood?
Crowds gather,
crows, prophets, martyrs wheel
together.
I felt electrified
and numb,
frozen and burned,
rushing between grief,
shame, and exhaustion.

Another pass
over the tapestry
warms my hands
momentarily.
I read again
how that solitary signal fire
burns.
At the edge of the picture,
where the leaves
of the trees
stretch skyward
with fat fingers,
a river quietly runs.
On a sandy beach
the twilight darkens
into night
and suddenly I remember
that place.
I remember
love under starlight.
How much can
a person know
and still call himself
sane?

She has woven a dolphin
into the river,
and his laugh
carries to me
into this lifetime.
Perhaps his charge
is to remember.
He brings loaves,
and fishes.
He is fire
in the water,
life in the ether,
laughter that startles
a company of mourners.
He is the candle
that breaks open
the darkness.
He is music
and dance,
celebration and enjoyment,
the libation before
and after
the storm.

The dolphin laughs
as the moon rises
over the mountains
through the last patch
of twilight.
The moon brings us
passion and wistfulness,
power and hunger.

She nods to the dolphin
and laughs at the rose
of our compass,
laughs at the way
we set our courses,
laughs at our belief
that iron will save us
and guide us.

She knots us
with longing
and restlessness.
How easily she calls us out
and betrays us!
She feeds us,
enlarges us,
and slays us.
Yet without her
our souls would be
threaded with grass,
our roots thin
and threadbare,
easily broken carpet
of awareness.

And the woman
who knew this
and stitched it,
rides to her fate
quietly
in a runaway carriage.

Today her dust mingles
in sunlight
with the dust
of my hardness.
I read
with my fingertips
the evidence
of her passing.
I feel constantly
the light
of her presence.

We scrawl notes
to each other
on the pages
of the centuries
and set
our signal fires
blazing for each other
in tapestries.
I know her by her hands
and her umbers and ochers,
her side lighted grays,
silk threads,
her spun precious metals,
her bloody burgundies
and a few other color choices.

She knows me
by the path of destruction
I have left
in the wake
of my frustration,
as she knows me
by my kindness,
my love
and devotion.

This weaving means more
than all of the others.
Of course
it is she
in the carriage
and I
bleeding beside her.
I am the watchful man
tending our child
in the forest.
I am our blindness.
I hold the stone
and I design
the tortures.

Rick Mobbs May 2008