Laura Donnelly

The Jack Loom

​
i.
 
Blue jeans torn in strips, knotted
and loomed, now rolled
before drafts or folded in closets,
faded in a kitchen
thirty years back where I sit
with Great-Grandmother playing
Aggravation, Chinese Checkers,
marbles ticking over the cardboard maze.
Her skin is transparent as Bible pages.
She licks one finger, flips
to another verse.
 
 
ii.
 
Shirts in primary colors
come in from the fields, once thick
warp and weft now a sieve.
Coveralls, curtains, housedresses
of dotted Swiss worn through Michigan
summers. We pick up the red stain
of strawberry like a ghost woven
under our feet.  
 
 
iii.                   
 
Her wicker basket was a bassinet
for castoffs, her scissor’s mouth
measuring waste not
want not.
                                                       
Let the treadle be similarly unrushed.
Let the weft be secure
from breast beam to back.
 
Let the sound of cloth
loosed into cloth
rise again
when we enter the house.

---

After Blake

Blake’s version of Eve:
          prayer hands slightly parted,
 
body arcing towards God.
          Her skin is the negative space
 
of the painting, a halo
          beneath the curled moon. Or
 
the halo emanates
          from God, his white gown
 
the brightest thing
          in Eden, his body a pillar
 
except for the arm
          that reaches, the thumb
 
relaxed as his palm pulls Eve up –
          And yes, the man sleeps
 
underneath her new feet,
          their limbs almost touching
 
but no sign of rib, no red gash
          in his side. She floats
 
like a dream or the distance
          between Adam’s sleep
 
and God’s hand, or perhaps
          God’s hand measures
 
the distance between
          her white brow and the moon –
 
Blake has not made it clear,
          the hierarchy, if there is
 
hierarchy, but even now
          as God’s hand
 
draws her up (or the moon
          does so), the line
 
of one calf suggests
          motion. Smallest flick
 
of Blake’s wrist. Between them
          the muscle testing
 
its new weight forward
          into world.

---

Garden Vernacular

          Vernacular gardens, by definition, are gardens of ordinary people
                    ​– Ced Dolder, “Vernacular Gardens”

Ordinary as a glass of milk, a gun,
a trio of stray cats that came to us
from the fields. Shall I name
all the flowers again? Yucca, daylily,
peony, hens-and-chicks – I’m tired of listing them.
Suffice it to say I watered those daylilies
thirty minutes each day, pulled 500 weeds
and dropped them into a Maxwell House tin,
scratched each task from my childhood
chore list as if I could answer
the world’s demands.
                                        When we left,
I followed the angels’ decree: didn’t 
turn back or clap, call or croon. For a long time
I thought history went to the winners,
and we were not them.
 
But then our mother’s new garden
unfurled, winding and strange on a city block –
the gloriosa daisies between cracks
in cement, ferns lapping up the dusky shade,
like hush and wonder. They tended
our secrets until our secrets no longer
needed tending.
 
It was not unusual to see bear cubs
in that garden. It was not unusual
 
to see that garden breathe.

--
Laura Donnelly's second poetry collection, Midwest Gothic, was selected by Maggie Smith for the 2019 Snyder Prize at Ashland Poetry Press. Donnelly is also the author of Watershed (Cider Press Review Editors' Prize), and her poems have appeared in Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Harvard Review, PANK, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York and is on the creative writing faculty at SUNY Oswego.