Day Three 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.

Three 10/03/10

She hung strings of fidelity

along hanging barbs of plain chant

and the wine of complementarity.

The country church spawned plebe

and grew manifold crimson lily

stone shot from the son of weed

Who wandered down from England

with his sons. Hugo chiseled that altar

tent over Lorenzo’s funny bone.

Beside him is the first celebrity martyr,

Justin of Palestine in the only church

we bombed, though it did not hurt her.

Note: A description of this significant valley in Tuscany is contained in A Tuscan Resume.