Rag Rug

It has arrived—the long rag rug

multiply folded. On top, one alien hair.

I put my face to the folds and smell despair

palpable as salt air

in all those rooms and houses, small and smug—

enclosures I passed through on my way where?

Whoever did the weaving appears old

in my mind’s eye. I can’t make out her face,

can only conjure up the faintest trace

of an abstracted grace,

clack of the loom. Does she know they’ll be sold

these precious things, in some unheard-of place?

I perch her on a hill, precariously

beyond the reach of waves’ daily boom.

Sun blazes overhead, but her dim room

(no bigger than the loom)

is proof against the violence of the sky

From it I further spin what I once called my home:

Endless horizons fading into haze,

the mornings dawn came up so rosy clear;

snails in the garden, sheep bells everywhere,

the brightness of the air,

terraces, valleys organizing space

and time’s cessation. So this package here

I’m now unwrapping, in New York, today

(rugs like rainbows, woven with a grace

my strands of language barely can express;

dishrags of dailiness

dispersed and recombined and freshly gay)

comes to me imbued with images,

slowly and faithfully across the water,

across the world. It represents a time

I myself snipped and recombined as rhyme

as soon as I went home,

if that is where I am. These rugs recover

the sense of stepping twice into a single river.

Copyright Credit: Rachel Hadas, “Rag Rug” from Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems. Copyright ? 1998 by Rachel Hadas. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Source: Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)