To The Colors of My Mother and Her Mother

Painting by Michael Keck

To the colors of my mother and her mother

Boiling water steams the windows,
then builds up and drips down
stripes of green and blue
along the big glasses of a room
that already is too hot in July,
breeds kindly sympathy
for sheep, who suffer in summer,
and plead to be sheared
for the love of weaving.

White wool is tinted like the firetruck
that moved over iced dirt to put out the fire
in the chimney, flames made by green wood and cold gray days,
the year when the sweep would not plunge the flue
because there was ice on the slate-blue roof,
and old slate cracks under sooty work boots.
The smoke was the color of the sheep,
who were carried as lambs from the auction, in the old jeep,
that was black and had blood-rust holes in its fenders.

In January, yellow comes
from onion bulb skins or incandescent lights in the kitchen
which burn at four-thirty. Yellow dye and white pounds
of stored fur wait for the weaver to make a fabric of animal
fleeces turning green, changing in the yellow warp
and blue woven weft. Hot vapor drives spiders from
the ceiling and back into the world of winds and dew
to make small laces on the railing. In the early summer
dawn, light catches colors in white nets left for those
who are caught off guard in the yard where sheep graze
and bleat when the noon temperature is just too much to bear.

The water in the kettle blazes brown like a loom's treadles
in the holy room's light, and weaver-woman kicks
at maple slats, laces fibers,
and makes up for evening's bedtime.


Linda Hogan