Chenille

CHENILLE

by James Dickey

There are two facing peacocks
       Or a ship flapping
On its own white tufted sail
At roadside, near a mill;

Flamingoes also are hanging
       By their bills on bedspreads
And an occasional mallard.
These you can buy anywhere.
They are made by machine
From a sanctioned, unholy pattern
rigid with industry.
They hoard the smell of oil

And hum like looms all night
       Into your pores, reweaving
Your body from bobbins.
There is only one quiet

Place—in a scuppernong arbor—
       Where animals as they
Would be, are born into sleep-cloth:
A middle-aged man’s grandmother
Sits in the summer green light
Of leaves, gone toothless
For eating grapes better,
And pulls the animals through

With a darning needle:
       Deer, rabbits and birds,
Red whales and unicorns,
Winged elephants, crowned ants:

Beasts that cannot be thought of
       By the wholly sane
Rise up in the rough, blurred
Flowers of the fuzzy cloth
In only their timeless outlines

Like the beasts of Heaven:
Those sketched out badly, divinely
By stars not wholly sane.

Love, I have slept in that house.
       There it was winter
The tattered moonfields crept
through the trellis, and fell

In vine-tangled shade on my face
       Like thrown-away knitting
Before cloud came and dimmed
Those scars from off me.
My fingernails chilled
To the bone. I called
For another body to be
With me, and warm us both.

A unicorn neighed; I folded
       His neck in my arms
And was safe, as he lay down.
All night from thickening Heaven,

Someone up there kept throwing
       Bedspreads upon me.
Softly I called, and they came:
The ox and the basilisk,

The griffin, the phoenix, the lion—
Light-bodied, only the essence,
The tufted, creative starfields
Behind the assembling clouds—

The snake from the apple tree came
       To save me from freezing,
And at last the lung-winged ship
On its own sail scented with potash

Fell sighing upon us all.
       The last two nails
Of cold died out in my nostrils
Under the dance-weight of beasts.
I lay, breathing like thread,
An inspired outline of myself,
As rain began greatly to fall, And closed the door of the Ark.