Leafy Glen: Twenty twelve line sonnets by Fr. Andrew

October 2, 2010

Why write sonnets for a website devoted to clothing?

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.

Leafy Glen

One 10/01/10

Kneedamned for twenty years

of river bend past eve and adam’s,

an “O” opened in the weirs

Privately sucking away sand

and glebe into far off fortune,

but there stayed seeding man.

Hanlon. She owned the deed

and called it “Leafy Glen,”

a mooring for the dead

That came because they could.

But word would not, not as

water that mates with cottonwood.

Leafy Glen