You will not perhaps believe this but I embroidered
pillowcases with the initial of my intended, when I was 16.
You have to separate the strands to get the tiny lines,
you have to circle back and back for the chain stitch.
You have to maintain a certain tautness. You have to sit
like an old lady by the fire. You are as ancient as Cro-Magnon.
There are embroidery fossils from 30,000 BC. Chinese thread-
work from 3500 B.C. You do this if you want to knot yourself
to the ages. There is chain stitch, stem stitch, that looks like
rope, split stitch (needle up through the middle) running
stitch, like a dotted line. Flame out, you skies, while
the stitches hold a filigree of vines! Filigree, from the Latin
for thread, and grain, grain turned into embellishment.
And curlicues, for the way longings can turn on themselves
as if they were confined to a closet. Think of Emily Dickinson
sewing one fascicle of her poems to another with a chain stitch.
Think of her, bent, birdlike, dipping and pecking.
Someone in China has machine-embroidered Klimt’s The Kiss
with gilt threads. Such devotion to detail. An artist named Ana
has embroidered rivers, moss, and rocks, falling loose,
outside the frame, off the hoop. Ana of the twenty-first century!
Try to imagine my young finger, unwrinkled, positively dewy,
thimble-capped, driving the needle through the dotted line.
Fleda Brown’s The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, was chosen by Ted Kooser for his University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. She has nine previous collections of poems. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her memoir, Driving With Dvorak, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.