THE BLUE VASE

Folks used to say that you could set your clock
by the lenght of Mama’s stitch.
When we asked Mama why that was she told us
it was because she loved numbers.
When we asked her why it was she loved numbers
she laughed, “Because you can count on them.”

“Math,” she said, “besides the Bible,
is the closest thing to the language of God
that we humans have.”
She told us that the universe
is a perfect mathmatical equation.
She looked for that perfect equation in everything,

Whether she was gazing at the stars, or
cooking bean soup, working out the progression
of a piano chord, or wrapping a present.
Whenenever us kids watched her arranging flowers
in that blue vase of hers, well,
we knew she’d found it.

AFRICA DREAMS TAPESTRY
5’6″w x 3’4″h

AFRICA DREAMS

Flat beneath her weight of heat and elephant,
Africa dreams.

Vulchur swoons into her silent straw landscape,
Giraffe leaps into her stark white sun,
Stiff tree mimes her ragged cloud.
Africa dreams.

Beneath her paradox of peace and movement
Memory of net and bar fray her edges.
Africa dreams.

INDIAN SUMMER TAPESTRY
3’9”w x 6’10″h
$975

INDIAN SUMMER

Summer forced itself right on into fall that year,
relentless and unforgiving as the neckties  and high heels
we still wore to work back then.
The sun’s own flowers had to turn away their faces.
But, oh my God! How sweet the mornings,
the coming of the night.

NOVEMBER HILLS  TAPESTRY
3’9″w x 4’1″h
$550

NOVEMBER HILLS

November has returned
to the Anderson Valley,
and with it,
the egret. Her white
reflection marks a question
against the three willows
at pond’s edge.

Near the lone oak
five sheep graze on new grasses
raised and greened by recent rain.

Tall thin trunks and
slender limbs
of nearly naked poplars
knit gray wood lace
across Van Gogh blue sky
and across knolled vineyards
the color of old brick streaked
with moss, and then crest
in a few final yellow leaf dabs.

Tan hills spread
and roll
into one another like
lover’s thighs, indifferent
to the cacophonous
post harvest cries of hungry birds.

MARGARITA TAPESTRY
3’10″w x 5’8″h
$775

MARGARITA

You couldn’t be with her for more than five minutes

without knowing the Lord had made His claim on her.

That her oldest son celebrated his own birthday

by giving her flowers, and that all those grown children

of hers wanted her to come live with them,

testified to who she was as a mother

That gypsy-eyed shed-boy she loved will always be

something of a mystery to folks, but we do know that this:

Like a scientist cloning an entire entity from a single cell—

given a shred from any verse in the Bible

he could reconstruct the total story of salvation,

and that was good enough for her.

© All Rights Reserved – Caron McCloud