Day Five Leafy Glen

October 3, 2010

Why write sonnets for a website devoted to clothing?

(sonnet starts below these two short paragraphs)

Mainly because of these sonnets deal with making. Penelope in the Homer’s Odyssey weaves during the day and unweaves at night to ward off the false suitors. I think of clothing as tied into the work of civilization to recall its original arts and face forward with them. I want to work at getting to the source of our identity. Just as the weavers in Guatemala weave in their story cloth, so have woven our story into the social fabric of the American experiment.

Another reason is that my intention in Goods of Conscience is not merely to make clothing, as noble as I have tried to make doing it. My intention is to recall to the Church the system of the benefice. The soul of parishes is making. I want to weave in some background as to why. Allen Tate said that “you can live without poetry but you can’t live well.” Making in a parish may seem superfluous until you try it.

Five 10/05/10

You were hewn from the oak of the barbarian,

good men that made their mettle wise,

hairy-chested and short, loving beer more than wine.

What made them loyal to land

settled into the loins of the cotter

and knowledge and nature rooted demesne.

But pull him out and he would like a mandrake scream.

To work was enough and to pray

exhaling Adam’s dream.

Adam was both sexes then.

Was it the moon that made Undine rise

to steal away a man from his lonely den?