Black wool coat on a hook

by Catherine Carter

It hangs so quietly, its lines straight and still:
nothing to see here, if you forget
that like everything, it’s the headlight
of an endless train of tales, the vanishingly
sharp point of a mile-long pencil stiff with story.
Behind belted back and flared skirt: overseas
factory, shears and pattern, women with swollen
bladders pedaling whirring needles, fear
of fire always at the door.  Behind that, weaving
room, then dye room, the reek of the mordant
to set the black fast, the tumor-tasting air, the gone
union jobs.  Back of that, spinning and carding
and fulling rooms, human lungs thick with lint.
Further, the slow adventures of sheep: oily
fleece under the shears, slotted pupils. Shearing
efficient and gentle, or slashing the shivering
flesh. Crouch of the herding hound.  Spring young,
kept to rear or taken for Easter, to wash
their devourers in the blood of the lamb.
Before that again, the grass, springy clumps
of March, vivid green flutters in the cold wind
beneath the pouring river of sunlight, blaze
of the star whipping in her own wind as her galaxy drags
her headlong toward Virgo.
The coat hangs on the hook,
pulled toward earth by weight of sheep,
throbbing backs, vats of dye, pastures of grass.
If you look, sun shines through its close-
woven warp and weft, sun which will one
day collapse into itself, turning first white
as a washed sheep, then in the end quiet and black
as a wool coat:  one I lift and slip on, as I walk out
into the March wind. Wrapped in and insulated by unknown
lives.  Buttoned into the whole world, and beyond.


CATHERINE CARTER is the author of several poetry collections, including Larvae of the Nearest Stars (LSU Press, 2019), The Swamp Monster at Home (LSU Press, 2012), The Memory of Gills (LSU Press, 2007), and Marks of the Witch (Jacar Press, 2013). Her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, Orion, Poetry magazine, EcotoneTar River PoetryCortland Review, and Ploughshares, among othersHer work has won the North Carolina Literary Review’s James Applewhite Prize, the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society’s Roanoke-Chowan Award, the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition, Jacar Press’ chapbook contest, Still: The Journal’s poetry prize, and the North Carolina Poetry Society’s poet laureate’s prize. Carter is a professor of English at Western Carolina University, a poetry editor for Cider Press Review, and the Jackson County regional representative for the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She lives in Cullowhee, North Carolina.