Ode to Sewing Baskets


In dusty attics or basements, wicker confections
wait to be rediscovered by new owners. They appear
at yard sales with flat squares of tailor’s chalk,
darning eggs, and pin cushions that look like apples,

a strawberry dangling free, stuffed with sand
for sharpening needles lined up on a scrap of felt.
Or needles stuck in thick red wool from a double-
breasted coat someone tackled with help from a teacher.

Threads and floss in various colors, wound on notched
cards, buttons sorted by size in tins that once held mints.
Rusting pins on cardboard, along with hooks and eyes.
Pinking sheers and scissors, better than you can buy now.

Best of all these devices is the notion
of a seam ripper — original tool to un-sew
what you closed in tiny stitches and want
to undo, undo! A chance to do it over.

first published in Apple Valley Review



Praise Song for Old Ways


Praise for wooden molds to shape butter churned
from whole milk, from a known and named cow,
praise for families who made small instruments
of wood and stone to call animals from the wild:
turkeys, moose, deer. Praise for plumb bobs,
pie safes, washing bowls and pitchers.

Praise for sealing wax and initialed stamps
and that moment of aroma at the writing desk
with smooth slats of a roll top. Praise for inkwells,
quills, and blotting paper, couriers who hand-delivered
love letters and waited for the reply. For pale blue
onionskin paper that folded into its own envelope.

For the brassy shine of sextants and sundials, inlays
of harpsichords, metronomes, and zithers,
for saltcellars, darning eggs, dyes made from berries.
Praise to those who made instruments useful,
beautiful, and perennial. To oilcloth, cloth diapers,
and the pages of Sears catalogs my grandmother

used instead of toilet paper, when nothing went
to waste, everything repurposed or burned as fuel.
Praise to old things that rust and collect the dust
of dying moths and cobwebs. They hide in basements,
on attic floors, in wooden trunks at the backs
of closets. Yes, that one with the secret door.


first published in Apple Valley Review