Worth Saving

It is an old blanket. Open weave, frayed ends,
the kind of thing your grandmother might make
if she were the crafting kind. The kind of thing
you would save to remember her by,
save well past it’s prime.

She did not make it of course. She was not
the crafty kind., more prone to books and music
and leading bible study for the old ladies,
all of which were a decade and more older than she.
No, You bought it at a tag sale somewhere in your past,

a cast off from someone else’s grandmother perhaps,
but you like it and the sense of rooting you feel
as you pull it over your legs late at night.
You like to imagine the children who have huddled here,
or the lovers by firelight, a whole history, all imagined
but still, precious to you as you read by dim lights.

You like your lights dim at night, which makes no sense
when you know by day you cannot get enough.
You lived in darkness so long that you crave it.
You bought your house for the light.
You fell in love with Vermont because of the light
somehow more fragile than what you were accustomed to in Virgiinia.

But at night, when the day is done
and you have seen perhaps too much in the brightness,
You are ready for soft, for faded shadows and pods of light
under the old Victorian floor lamps that litter the room.
It is when you come back to the romance you once lived in,
when life was soft, or at least you believed it was.

It is an illusion, that softness. I came to that realization late.
People are broken and jagged and their edges cut others.
It is a world of the walking wounded, walking at least
until they cannot walk any longer. There are betrayals
and abandonments and fears and they live in the light
and shadows, But here, in the dimness, with your old blanket

you can pretend, or at least remember
that the romance you believed in and lived by
was not entirely a lie. It simply broke, as most things do
with wear and tear. And that life is less broken
than frayed like the old blanket, frayed
and worth saving.

About this poem

Once again, not a poem I intened to write. My muse seems to have a mind of it’s own these days, and I just come along for the ride.

True parts: Neither of my grandmothers were crafty people. My mothers mom, did teach a bible class to ladies in the nursing home most of which were much younger than her. She called them her “old ladies.”

The photograph was taken at Olana, Frederick Edwin Church’s home in Hudson, NY. Church was a leading light among the Hudson River school of painters,

Tom