1.
The girl is given a knot
of thread the size of a boulder
with no beginning and no end and told
to wind it into a proper skein suited
for weaving by morning. The prize,
of course, is marriage.
2.
She is only ten, fifth grade,
it is the year somebody’s mom
comes to her class once a week to teach
the girls to knit. She wants to make something.
It’s the year of no money so she chooses it
for herself—not the smooth-skeined
Red Heart that unspools cleanly from its center,
but Aunt Lydia’s Rug Yarn,
only thirty-nine cents a skein, meant to be cut
into finger-length pieces and knotted
into stiff canvas mesh, then put on the floor
and walked on. She wants to make
anything.
You take what you get.
A loose-looped mess she’d have to untangle
and roll into a ball before she could take it
to school. All weekend on the living room floor
with yard-long tangles and knots the size
of softballs. One loop drawn free
brings on a paroxysm of snarl
somewhere else down the line.
All weekend on the floor.
She could fix it, she would fix it.
Don’t try to stop her.
3.
Decades later, on her way out the door,
she still is looking for the why of it all,
believing now that the husband was really
trying to get rid of her from the start.
She insists on an answer.
All he can say is this—
he doesn’t know why,
but he thinks he loves her
when he sees her working for hours
on something all laid out on the floor,
down on her hands and knees,
with next to nothing
of something impossible,
trying to make it work
and willing for anything.