A Turn of the Century Sewing Machine
Made before electricity put easy life
at our fingertips touching the radio
or its own kind immediately alive—
a time when lights burned brighter for the greater darkness
of streets and houses, and the motherly empire,
this machine busied to elbows and deft fingers
in a room that seems cosy as history, forcing
a quality stitch into good cloth
we now view behind glass.
Now here’s the machine,
shuttle primed as lightning from the gloom
of a junk shop’s losing tenure over woodworm;
it’s got you focused, the cloth is running
as it did through Victoria’s tight corseted reign,
and still it stitches a beeline through these collapsible times.
I am sitting mending the sleeve of an old dress.
Light from a big yellow lamp falls on a fold
of blue cotton like evening sun, stroking the downy nap
until it smiles. A car hums in the street.
A log stirs in the fire. The dress lies warm in my lap
like a friendly cat. I am not thinking much
about the past when kingfisher blue flashed
at the tail of my eye, dipping through shadow and gleam
in a forest of windows. I am not thinking much
about the future when one day, old and bent,
I’ll find the dress pushed to the bottom of a rag-bag,
its blue brittle and thin as the wings of moths.
I am just poking the needle in and out
bringing together two segments of frayed cloth
under the arm. As I turn the cotton this way
and that I see that I’m making a seam,
a dark line like a straight creek lying between
blue fields where, traffic lulled to a hum,
a comfortable cat smiles and stirs, warm
as a dozing log, where a kingfisher flies in the trees
and moths come down to dance in the golden light
of the present moment.
Workbox
(inside detail)
