The skill at weaving was itself a web
All right, but not one I was caught in-neither
That, nor my oh-so-celebrated pride in it
Led me to want to show her my stuff.
But rather to show her-
Well, weaving, admittedly, can be the best
Of work: onto the warp of unsignifying strength
Are woven the threads of imaging that
Do their unseen work of structure too,
But can depict even while they draw
The warp together: my images are thus
Truly in and of the fabric, texture itself becoming
Text, rather than lying, like painting,
Lightly upon some canvas or some wall.
It was not to challenge her,
Like some idiot warrior going up against some
Other idiot warrior: say rather
That it was to hear the simultaneous song
Of two harmonious shuttles, nosing in
And out of their warp like dolphins out
Of their one blue and into another.
But they will say that what I so wonderfully wove
Was all those terrible unfunny rapes her father
Changed himself into those shapes-flame,
Gold, swan, bull and all-in order more amusingly
To carry out: he was at least a connoisseur
Of bestialities. And not to speak of Neptune,
Apollo and the rest of them with their dallying below stairs.
No, it was none of that: who needs
Yet more porn, and yet more subtleties
Of formal treatment-legs, arms, and affrighted
Lineaments rhyming with patterns compliant branches make, and
Glittering vague waves and high suggestive clouds?
And then the whole array of nasty vignettes bordered with
Flowers and ivy intertwined-intertextos — says
That liar, Ovid, as if I had been reading
Some old book of the floral! No, it was none of that:
Who needs yet more vegetative decoration
Reducing the restless gaze to the blankly satisfied stare?
No: it was she herself I would show, the weaver
Woven into my web, the face of terrifying wisdom
Beyond the knowledge of Apollo and the tricky lore
Of Hermes. And that is what went into my web,
What grew out of my dancing hands and singing
Eyes and seeing heart. Her face emerged from
My sky and my clouds—was it not then something
Of my face, as well? She paused in her own work
And gazed at mine;
And to the Goddess’ gray eyes
That image of her seemed, for too long a moment,
To be even more real than she was herself.
Too long, but still
A moment: for then her thread of thought broke as
A sudden wind blew through the chamber
We were working in, and shook the veil
And set the face of wisdom a-trembling,
Which with trembling gaze she coldly noted.
And that was all for weaving and for me.
All the mechanics and the pain-oh oh the pain
Of the transformation will go undescribed
No, there will be none of that.
Say only that here I am, what I have never
And yet somehow ever been.
Back then when I was not as I am,
I toiled not, neither did I spin,
But wove, in and out, the shuttle working
Almost at should I say, its own sweet will?
Now I spin instead of weaving, and make
Webs that deceive by no pictorial sleights, but
Trompent l’œil in another way: not imaging things
That seem to be, but building traps that seem not to.
And it is not that I sit now at the center of the whole
Thing, waiting for its delicate strong threads to trap
The stupidly unwary, or to fascinate the clever
Who trace the pattern of its trusswork
And wonder how much its yielding beauty
In a gentle breeze may in itself be a trope
Of a trap, until they too are trapped in that metaphor of a metaphor,
The thing itself, the very thing. It is not that
I sit there, for that minutely dense center
Is a riddling figure of me: all the rest
May be seen as being drawn out of it, as from myself.
No: I sit tight in an upper corner
Regarding my lovely gossamer garden,
Until someone unwise is caught in the toils of my toile.
Then he becomes the center
Of my concern, and I wrap my lines about him,
Preserved if not eternized in the cocoon
Of my sonnet. But in time
He will be gone, and my web will break,
And float to and fro in some breeze or other.
And then? As I start out again to spin
A new tale, another jail of voile, another
Geometric wonder, I remember
The face of the Goddess, as I
Affix my prime filament to the right
Place, and begin
To spin, upward as I move down, hanging
Like life itself, after all, by a thread.
Leave a Reply