My husband bought this shawl for me in Florence, Italy many years ago. I keep it draped over my bedroom wall. I think I may have worn it once. It's the sort of shawl to wear to an opera, maybe Tosca or La Traviata. It's also the sort of shawl that feels out of place here in Cullowhee. Actually, it ought to be an opera singer's shawl. And since I sing opera only in my dreams, amazing myself as I walk onstage to hear Musetta's aria coming out of my mouth, maybe I've always felt that this shawl is just too special for someone like me to wear.
The black shawl below is another matter. I ordered it from the Sears Catalog--yes, Sears--so you know how long I must have had it. Whenever I wore it, it picked up various debris in its long fringes, like a net, and so I came to think of it that way, as a net gathering up a woman's sensibility. Her dreams, fears, and songs.
That image was the start of my third book, Black Shawl, from which Celia Miles and Nancy Dillingham wanted to reprint the title poem in their recent Clothes Lines anthology. They couldn't afford it, though, because my publisher, asked a huge reprint fee. So much money for one poem? I was astonished and horrified.
Nothing to do, then, but to write another shawl poem, which I did surprisingly quickly. Maybe the mountain woman's voice in it is a close cousin to the woman's voice in Black Shawl. Yes, it's in the anthology, which again I recommend highly. And although I don't approve of any poet's poems being kept from anthologies because of unreasonable reprint fees, I'll have to concede that this time those fees pushed me into writing a poem that I like and am pleased to see published in this anthology.
River Shawl
She’d dribble the fringe of her shawl
in the river. The quick current rippled the black threads.
They floated as she wished she could.
They wanted to be swept away but she held fast
to what had been woven. Her mother’s shawl.
Now her own. How much longer
to be handed down, this black keepsake?
She’d lift out the fringe,
rub it over her face, feel the cold
water run down her cheeks,
down her neck,
into white folds of flesh underneath the dress
worn before her by her kinswomen.
What might she catch in this web
if she let it drift far enough
out of the shallows,
into the dark center
where she could not see the bottom?
How far would she have to wade
until she stepped into
some other world, under the sun-dappled
surface? The river itself was a shawl,
always wrapping itself round the hills,
threaded with golden light,
trailing its castaway leaves.
It could weave her into its weft,
carry her farther than she could imagine--
the sea she could feel surging
inside when she let herself
want what she knew she could not
have, a life she could open
as wide as a closet door onto
garments no woman had worn
before her. Nobody’s life but her own.
from Clothes Lines, ed. by Celia Miles and Nancy Dillingham, Catawba Publishing, 2009.
