ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN - PART ONE, CHAPTER THREE

 

 

 

 

 Pattern on a 1771 woven coverlet, reprinted by permission of 

The National Museum of the American Coverlet, Bedford, Pennsylvania

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Reason Weaves          

 

                                               

Diah was a superstitious man

who looked for signs and omens in his dreams,

the moon, and shooting stars. He’d not abide

a black cat in the barn. He counted crows,

and slept feet facing south. Contingent on

the farmland’s need—or not—for sun and rain,

he’d find and kill a snake and either hang

or drown it. Even as a little boy

he’d kept a lucky charm—a codfish bone—

and drew his stockings on, first left, then right.

 

 

His journeys rarely started on a Friday;

he never trimmed his finger-nails on Sunday;

and in accordance with the local lore,

he married on a Wednesday afternoon.

Thus Diah was alarmed when Rachel placed

the linsey-woolsey paneled coverlet

that had been passed on down from Granny Tuttle

and Rachel’s mother—both of whom had died

not long past forty—on their wedding bed.

He voiced his dread in no uncertain terms.

 

 

So Rachel put the coverlet away,

wrapped in calico, where it would lie

unseen, unused, but not unvisited.

For, in those rare and scattered unfilled hours,

she’d open up the cedar dowry chest,

remove the coverlet, and lose herself

in the embrace of its remembered scents

and in the white and sky-blue warp and weft

of other lives now absent from her own.

One day it would become a winding sheet.