| Laura Polley is an MFA student in poetry at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a professional handknitting designer as well as a writer of essays and poems. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crescent Moon Journal, Mississippi Review online, Alimentum, Autumn Sky Poetry and Margie. Laura lives in the Indianapolis area, where she was born and raised. |
Winter 2006 Table of Contents - Vol. II, No. 4 |
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Picking Up Stitches from the Past * * * * Egypt’s calendars say it’s 600 C.E. I have made my son a pair of socks. He puts them on, skips over the sand. His feet dance in their bright sleeves, flashing like sun on the distant cliffs. I knit them with one needle, a tapestry needle, eyed like Horus. My son likes wearing the rainbow I coaxed from the earth; it is friendlier than the shimmered winds arching above us in the foreign sky. My son has five toes on his foot, as all sons should—but his sock has only two, long and alert like rabbit ears, spaced for the thong that keeps his sandal on. We all have socks like this.The broiling sands inflame. Yet no one says, “it’s too hot for wool.” * * * * My husband is gone, he’s sunk with the Mary Rose, and we 700 widows grieve. He took to his ocean bed a cap I fashioned for him. Newlyweds we were, married this year of our Lord 1545, and on sailors’ wages we didn’t have much, but I used the finest wool I could find. I knitted it by day in the English spring, just before he set off seaward. My man was fond of a tipple now and then but I loved him just the same. Now he’s had his last drink, toppled under the water, gone from my sight like the horizon during a storm. And only the stitches of my hands to keep us warm.The women braid memories together. And no one says, “Never knit for a lover till you’re married.” * * * * When I’m five, Mama says, I will have to knit a whole stocking. She says my industry will make me good, even though I’m a boy, and the devil finds work for idle hands. This New World is not like England, and Mama says we must keep our wits about us. So every day I must practice, before I can leave the house and play. I know how to knit pretty well with two needles. See my stockings? Mama made them, but the long strips wrapped around them I did myself. Wrapping the stockings saves them from unraveling until I am old enough to make my own. I can’t believe that in only two months I will know how to work five needles.The children choose feisty red yarn. And no one thinks “grannies” or “rocking chair.” * * * * Triangle #2I pick up my triangle, a closed V, an A with the crossbar lowered. I have made this shape out of stitches which are also V’s. The geometry impresses me: a crystal broken to reveal identical crystals inside. The wool yarn I have chosen is called “Kureyon,” a charming transliteration of “crayon” that, like the yarn itself, is uniquely Japanese. Neither overly soft nor overly scratchy, and lacking the pungent sheep bouquet of most wools, the Kureyon is saved from mediocrity by its signature feature: color. This yarn revels in color, dances with it, splashes it in huge bright waves so vast that you can knit several rows, several inches, before encountering the next shade. One glance at the skein in my lap tells me that before my work is done, I will meet ruby and fuchsia, jungle green and olive, peppered lavender and rusty carrot orange, each color joining hands with the one before it and after it like a reception line in a flower garden. More magical yarn has never been made, and I’m not alone in my awe. Kureyon has been a popular favorite among knitters since it first appeared on the worldwide market. I turn my triangle sideways and puncture it along the edge with one needle, drawing new loops of yarn through the holes I make. This is called “picking up stitches,” a technique often used to add edgings or neckbands to an existing sweater. Six stitches now line the triangle on its east edge, and a new triangle has begun. I shape this shape—angle the triangle—by decreasing down to one stitch as I did before. The yarn has, irresistibly, begun to blush and fade, making this second triangle not green-black like the first, but deep vegetable green like dark kelp among reeds. I look at my knitted shapes: three-angled fraternal twins, one growing from the edge of the other, an Eve by Adam’s side, and they are good. They are becoming something larger than themselves. * * * * Paris, 1793. The air is chill and tense with static. In the Place de la Concorde the cart women gather, with chattering fingers, in front of the guillotine to knit. As executions go, today is special: Madame DuBarry, the popular darling, has been sentenced to severance from her head. The crowd of people slouches against the cold, awaiting the tumbrel cart that will soon careen with DuBarry into the square. They know what to expect: the last words, the poised dignity of the doomed woman’s final publicity. Then, routinely, the shirring sound, the heft of wood, the thundering blade. Cheers will drown out the splattering of blood, as the crowd acknowledges this diversion, loath to resume their weary day.Madame DuBarry will have nothing of decorum. Madame DuBarry will have nothing of pride. She is here now, a prisoner in the rollicking tumbrel cart, to ruin the day for everyone. She screams, she wails, she collapses in dread. She begs and howls. Her well-loved face, so fine-boned and pale, cracks like chiseled porcelain under free-flowing tears. She will not cooperate with the executioner’s aides. She does not care about pretentiousness and poise. The crowd sits still, unexpectedly horrified. Madame DuBarry wrestles, shrinks, holds up desperate hands and cries. Please, monsieur, one more moment, just a little moment, please, monsieur…non non non non non, spattering the crowd with screams, hot vibrations of humanity. On and on—she does not stop, until the cold blade silences her, silences the crowd, silences the air. The cart women, les tricoteuses, continue knitting with eyes turned downward, as the crowd, faced with mortality, covers its collective face and cries. Gentle Neros fiddle with sticks, untouched by the burn. So history mutters. But these women knew something, though not in so many words: knitting speeds recovery from post-traumatic stress. * * * * Governor Hunt sits in a fireside chair in his office, giving an interview to the New York Times. Burly and bespectacled like Grover Cleveland, he wears a mustache in a chevron, like twin caterpillars grazing on his face. The illusion of virility the mustache creates is offset by his round, balding head. In his large, puffy hands he holds two needles in the air, unabashedly knitting, doing Arizona’s part for the troops in the first world war. “I find I have quite a lot of spare time,” he says, as the unwinding yarn ball drums an irregular staccato upon the table to his left.The executive of state shows all the world what he can do. And no one dares to say, “Knitting is for girls.” * * * * The whitecoat leaves the room and another strange woman walks in. Every day it’s the same, and every woman calls me “Mom.” I must be old; my hands have too much skin. They call this a hospital, so I reckon that’s where I am. And it must be winter again, ‘cause that’s snow, sure as shootin’, falling down outside them windows. I do remember winter. Now the woman’s talking to me, holding up some dog-eared book. I don’t need picture books. I got pictures day and night rolling through my head. Fancy dresses, Tommy Dorsey, music and glamour swirling like a lollipop, whisking me away. Such good old days. I could dance forever to the tunes in my head. But somebody always got to interrupt it.This woman puts that book right down in my lap and opens it up. I hear the music and try to hold on to it, but then I notice the pictures of the knitting. Everything goes silent; the big band takes five. I’m looking at the brightest red yarn I’ve ever seen. So lively—something special. Yes, I remember that stitch. It’s called the basketweave, and it was always my favorite pattern. I used this stitch to teach my daughter, my Mary Anne. She was my only child. So beautiful—long blonde hair and taffeta and ribbons. We’d sit and knit this stitch together. And over here next to it, why, there’s the sweetheart stitch, don’t it look just like a pretty little heart? I made you a sweater, Mary Anne, remember? A sweetheart sweater for my sweetheart. You picked the yarn and you helped me wind it and then you wore it on your seventh birthday. Mary Anne looks up from the page and I touch her hair and give her a smile. Then suddenly she’s crying, poor little thing. She looks just like she did when she was a girl. I reach out to give her a hug and say, “It’s all right, darling. Momma’s here.” She holds me so tight you’d think the world was ending. She must be going through something rough in her life right now. I sure wish she’d come visit more often. I’d give up my music and my dance floor—hell, I’d give up any old thing—just to make my baby stop crying. I wonder why she’s never come before, but she won’t tell me. She just rocks me, rocks me, cradles my head and sobs. A stitch from the past knits a link to the present. All else forgotten, the knitting still glimmers. Psychologists call knitting an intellectual habit, and insist it can stave off dementia. * * * * Triangle #3The knitting under my fingers has begun to transcend my involvement with it. From those first small triangles I have built a sort of flat geodesic burst, a collection of vividly colored shapes, each one springing directly from the last. Every new triangle blooms like a thorn from a different branch, as I rotate the patchwork to go off in a new direction. Angles and corners bounce off each other, accentuated by the striping colors of the yarn’s own intuition. Knitting in this way, bit by bit and color by color, gives the work itself a kind of automatic, predestined ambition that is not mine. I am less a visionary than a helpful guide, a collector of rocks on divergent paths. I did not raise the sheep that shed their warmth into this yarn. I did not wash and card the fleece that floated on air like clouds, and I did not preside over wheel or spindle to twist the yarn into a strand. I do not know anything about dyeing, or of the process that painted the yarn, in harmony with earth and jungle. This knitting I do is just the final step, just my part of a cumulative process. It’s like moving into an old house. I feel the presence of those who lived here first, generations maybe, inhabiting space with me. I admire the glass, the woodwork, the moldings, and add a few touches of my own. I feel cold spots and see ghosts, but I do not fear them. They belong too. We can coexist here, in a shared warm space, the past and the present, like companions by the hearth. It’s peaceful, knitting—like breathing a timeless air, like writing a dream in a journal. When the triangles are finished—when I’ve curved them over shoulders, around ribs, and under wrists—this creation will be a sweater. That is, it will look like a sweater to observers, who will see in it a kind of accomplishment. For myself, the finished sweater is nothing more than a passport stamp, a souvenir of faraway travels. I can wear it, show it off, admire it and be proud, but all of these benefits are superficial. It’s the experience of knitting that speaks to me, in the language of collective memory. My sweater results from triangles—and what is a triangle but a focused circle? Hands joined in prayer, spirits joined in time, the earth spinning, the colors revived. © Laura Polley |
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