#2490 -- life in the quilt

 

2490

7.298

27.x.26

life in the quilt

ekphrastic for Hayashi Sayoko’s ‘Machiya Quilt’

 

life in the quilt is a forest

there is a house of all seasons shone

 

rooftops and rainbright

in leftover sleep

 

the flower and the leaf put out

 

a house is cut from this memory

 

life is as dreaming from the day gone

 

is it for us to know?

 

there is a whimsy of hills

 

are we here?

 

the house is a piano

clouds sewn over

 

what bird will sing past this stillness?

 

crowd in a wild dance these woods are

 

life is a leaf in the forest

it’s turning

 

later some stars

stay in bed

 

and some fall

 

roof is a quilt of cloud, of star

 

ways of a dream are as a garden

all turns, never the same

 

as if it were cut from lost cloth

… here are the other lives

 

there’s a moon

there are many

we’ve known them all

to dream this far

 

dream this house past, dream another

 

some days in the rain road’s nearly gone

 

in some sleeps least ships slip by

 

with how have we come

and where may we go?

 

that’s how people may dream on

 

there’s life in the quilt and under

 

nothing here but the hands to touch

she is making the cloth from leftover sleep

 

building the house from the dream

 

through gate after gate

each step more sacred

 

can you see?

 

it’s through merely a lattice so

 

someone is looking out from a window

 

no clock will tick through

no news will touch

 

winter’s away

 

this quilt will keep me warm