Basket Making, or The Art of Touching
published in Four Quarters to a Section 2010, SDSPS

The rim’s crammed off
by dried brown willow wales,
eleven inches atop hours
of manual prayer that
slopes up in layers like a ziggurat,
a work of pride and humility,
an oxymoron in our culture
of mass produced, farm raised willow,
identical piles of scores of baskets.
The upsett tapers in and then
flares out for eight tall gibbous inches,
until touching down at the base.
Slaths are beginnings, like
the rite of spring that I wait for, watching ditches
and field borders for suckers,
pollarded rods and coppiced willows,
to begin my mandala that’ll be hidden from sight.

I loved the art before I learned the terms
of basketry that I embrace
in mouthfuls, as arm loads of bundled pine needles
and piles of willows.
I have tools: secateurs, sharp and clean,
and have a use for bodkins, even if
mine’re just knitting needles,
a metal stone that’s a weight from my son’s barbells,
my rapping iron, just a cloth wrapped wrench,
and clothespins are clothespins.
But I’m weaving, waling, rapping
in an ancient way with uncultured weeds,
overgrowth, wild woman’s vines, elm shoots.
The continuum of encasing, enclosing, carrying, sorting
and winnowing keeps me centered, held together.
The irony that wrist supple, weak tendrils
can carry loads of life’s paraphernalia
when properly handled, shaped, isn’t lost on me.
Being slyped and buffed
doesn’t make anything that looks special,
unless used and conserved, appreciatively.
The art of touching,
manual prayer.