Quilt Pieces

by Laurie Yawitz Kirkpatrick

Supplication

Another quilt
assembles its congregation on the cutting table.

It’s an immigrant crowd,
shawled in garlic leaves and shredded cabbage,
there to ward off divorce,
miscarriage, early cancer,
seeking something to cover the children’s beds
now that they have gone.

There is comfort in bolts of bright cloth
lined up like bottled spices.

And the old clothes will be reborn:
the blind will be gifted with sight
and recognize color
before they can see objects.
The world will become a crazy quilt
wrapping variously,
lovingly around them,
every way they turn.

Jacob’s Ladder

Our oldest quilt is spread
beneath the bedroom window –
a “Jacob’s Ladder”
Pennsylvania Dutch.
Prints sunny as mother’s aprons
rise on flagpoles
against the white cotton sky:
a place for the extraordinary
to descend.
Its borders are glowing checkerboards,
a game of strategy and luck.

We are trying to conceive.
We touch tenderly as snap peas.
He reads me like a recipe
handed down for generations,
a recipe he knows by heart.

Mouth savors mouth
ribs open into ribs.
Drawn, aching, to the hungry edge
and pushed over into a trembling
of wings, I think:
we’ve done it here.

But I’m wrong.
It’s months later
in a coupling I
can no longer recall.

Fugue

Come into this
“Spiral Lone Star”
with me.
Speak softly
and cover your shoulders.

In the silence
diamonds turn within diamonds,
radiant as stained glass.
Candles waver with light,
the earthy red clay and teal of mountains,
tenor canopies of leafy green,
a blue black bass flows on
in continuo. Patterns echo
like a fugue thrown from voice to voice:
each iteration a snowflake,
a fingerprint.

From timeworn articles of life –
antique plates and wedding rings,
log cabins and flying geese –
such beauty is engineered,
lifting us into luminous air.
Beauty embellished with almost invisible
stitches: blueprints laid over cloth,
like Klee’s faint cities floating
over gardens of yellow and mauve.

Beauty is layered so deep
that it takes binoculars, held backwards,
to catch the full effect,
to see the whole
as across the exhibition hall.

As across the concert hall
where a choir of stunned apostles,
in counter point with the angry mob,
the halo of violins,
and the witnessing angel voices
of young boys resound
in a storm
that stills your breath.

 

Last rites

A quilt for whomever will die next.

Purple lilacs crosstitched in a lattice of grey.
Heliotrope, lavender,
transient perfumes.

A purple heart for bravery.
Ravenna with her inch long hair,
dignified and unflappable:
a polished teaspoon
holding her pain smoothly.

The purple plums of Cheryl’s breasts
the angry cysts clotted around her ovaries,
the poisoned juice in her lungs.

Purple iris Sarah
an etching of her former self,
thin as filo leaves.
Her thoughts, mostly air, circle slow now
like Chinese fans.

And Rob, an unsteady eggplant
who grows funny and obstinate
in insulin fog,
then topples on his face, bewildered,
left to the mercy of strangers.

It’s a heart-rending raffle.

A quilt purple with the sweet sex of time,
the resonance and complication of aging.

Purple for charity, for condolence.
We gather together in regret.
Regret sleeping in the gathers.
A quilt handed down to each of us in turn.

 

Round

Round are all the openings to the body.

The first form we follow in love:
the shining planet of a mother’s eye,
the breast heavy with milk,
a plump rocking heart, a full stomach,
even the circle of fire through which
a fishy grey life leaps into the light.

In “Moon Over Mountains”
a month of nights
pass across
the panes of a window.
Moons of various hues and phase
slip behind the precipice
and circle back to fullness
like a constant circus parade
of elephants, lions
and slender, sequined acrobats.
No one here will go flying off into space and disappear.
No one has to say goodbye.

In the “Wedding Ring” quilt
cornflower blue and dusty rose cross
again and again
conforming to a promise.
The wild looping aerial display of love
becomes a gardenia floating in a bowl.
The globe of the lighthouse is polished
again and again.
A beacon faithfully circles the sea,
performing the act of kindness
until there is kindness.

Curved seams are not for the beginner.
They rear up like untamed horses
from the presser foot, and must be coaxed
and wrestled into place.
Some days a circle is only a cinder track
round which we run,
our muscles quivering with effort.
But some days it is a wreath
hung on the door of home,
or a tire rolling to the place
we have not yet seen
but have reached together.

 

United

Small town women gathered around a quilting frame
to brighten the winter;
canners, gardeners, sandwich-makers;
artists with collections of crisp cotton and rotary blades;
grandmothers in the silence of an empty house;

women who cushioned the wagon seats with quilts
and wrapped cholera victims for burial beside the trail
laurels for eternity
acorns for immortality
roses for the frailty of life;
women who squinted in kerosene light
or tacked thousands of unseen stitches
into Baltimore album blocks;
abolitionists quilting for the cause;
freed slaves sewing their story quilts;
depression era seamstresses filling string quilts with old newspaper;

Amish women adorning simplicity—
sunshine and shadow,
pumpkin, olive and black;
Mexican women, unfettered and pragmatic,
with their denim and wild flowers;
Hmong refugees’ maze mandalas –
the elephant foot, the snail house, the water lily:

We are united by our love of things shining and soft –
the coat of many colors
saturated and luminescent,
the velvet blue in the swallowtail’s wing.

We are united by our insistence
that art is to be used,
to be worn out in the service of life:
art to sleep under,
art to keep out the wind,
art to launder with the shirts and the underwear,
art to throw over the grass for a picnic.

 

Together we build sculptures of beach wood
that are swept out with the tide.

Imagine us scattering beauty,
wasting handfuls of beauty
spilled like gold coins
into the ordinary day
until the summer fields and shelterbelts
the knotted streets and dark woods
are a brilliant counterpane
stretched to the horizon.

Imagine a legion of many-colored women,
entering the battleground
arms loaded with glorious quilts.
We muffle the gunfire.
We obscure the borders.
We hide the enemy.

Imagine war
stopped in its tracks by beauty,
by quilters, swaddling every last
mud-and-sweat-caked soldier
in robes of scarlet and spring green,
every life
in pinwheels and stars.

***

(Laurie lives in Albany, California)

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