Eavan Boland

"Listen to me," I said to my neighbor,
"how do you make a hexagon-shape template?"

So we talked about end papers,
cropped circles, block piecework
while the children shouted and
the texture of synthetics as compared
with the touch of strong cloth;
and how they both washed.

"You start out with jest so much caliker,"
Eliza Calvert Hall of Kentucky said--
"that's the predestination
but when it comes to cuttin' out
the quilt, why you're free to choose."

Suddenly I could see us
calicoed, overawed, dressed in cotton
at the railroad crossing, watching
the flange-wheeled, steam-driven, iron omen
of another life passing, passing,
wondering for a moment what it was
we were missing as we turned for home--

to choose
in the shiver of silk and dimity
the unlived life, its symmetry
explored on a hoop with a crewel
needle under the silence of the oil light;

to formalize the terrors of routine
i n the algebras of a marriage quilt
on alternate mornings when you knew
that all you owned was what you shared.

It was bedtime for the big children
and long past it for the little ones
as we turned to go
and the height of the season went by us;

tendrils, leaps, gnarls of blossom,
asteroids and day stars of our small world,
the sweet pea ascending the trellis
the clematis descended
as day backed into night
and separate darks blended the shadows,
singling a star out of thin air

as we went in.