Sewing With My Great-Aunt Leonie Amestoy

Suzanne Noguere

Today you bend over organdy

In organic toil, working the small red squares

The way in your youth old men bent over earth

And still coaxed wheat and corn from the Basque soil.

You fold the cloth, then slowly roll the edges

Until rose petals bloom in your hands,

Vivified by the stitch that shirs them softly

The way the skin is shirred around your eyes.

Crooked like a mitered edge, your index finger

At rest stays poised above an unseen needle.

Indoors, surrounded by left-over silk

And wool, we rearrange the rainbow’s spectrum,

Sorting the tools of your trade–bright spools of thread,

Small silver thimbles, scissors, and the red

Pincushions studded with glass-headed pins-

As we need them, laboring in your field.

We overlap the petals; roses thrive

Under the lamplight in your wintry room.

Next you teach me the genesis   of frogs:

We turn the tubing and vivid cloth emerges

Out of itself like a snake sloughing its skin;

You whorl it tightly and I think this is

How your great spirit must exist in you

Compactly, coiled like a spring.

From what misfortune could you not recover

Who as a child made the pilgrimage

To Lourdes, eastward through the low green mountains

Of your own land? You say the Virgin slept

And say it lightly as if you had not been

Bitterly born to your mother’s shame

In an age when no one could tell you of

The tiny gland that kept you tiny.

Self-taught and independent by your own

Inventions, you make buttons out of thread,

Handbags with pockets hidden within pockets,

And dresses that unfold as if corollas

With minute parts inside. You instruct me in

Techniques as secret as nature’s, my fingers

Sure when yours are, atremble when yours falter

Those sharp days when you feel more and more mortal.

Suzanne Noguere lives in New York City.