Greatcoat Issue One

What is A Tenor      G. C. Waldrep                                                             (return to top of page)


An apple in December. Sweet. Will ask upwards. Will move from side to side as if a great earthwork nudging past attraction into some valid spectrum. Sweet. Will recede from this frame coupled by portrait and with fresh nefarious but not often. Sweet. Will approach a singular grief, subsume a guileless endeavor. Sweet. Sweet. Will not fall.

Cemetery Grass      David Wagoner                                                    (return to top of page)

The blades keep coming back.
They keep showing up
in the best possible light.

They rise together
but not quite long enough
to bear more seeds

or high enough to bend
and sway in the wind
under the summer sun

or out of it under the moon
like an old unruly crowd
of ghosts disturbing the night.

The man in the machine
is cutting them off short
among the remains of flowers.

Good Swim      John Niekrasz                                                            (return to top of page)

And if I have a child a spire rose
will cover her small folds. I will
hold her up against the city light
to see if her eyes avoid the sticks
holding up my arms. She caws
for poor Lisbon, an old bow
around her waist. I will dip her
in a light wash of denatured
hyssop and if I have a statue
by then it will be covered it will
be plumb. I will remember to twist
open her shunt, nightly prayer.
They sell pressed apples after dark
just in case.
                  Mornings she rolls
in the lines of workdust on the table.
Puts an ear to the soil's hinges
and watches the whole island labor
at its wheel. Her hiding place weeps
prey into the forest. The birds cling.
My child is no soft jar. There is
side-to-side movement in her neck
and a hollow bead. She gives me
rations, flight-damaged hearing,
an ice raft. Rubs a key against
my throat. I am held beneath the arms
by a taut lay of seagrass.
Her hands smell of coin.

Margaret Mary Alacoque       Anne Heide                                    (return to top of page)

her stomach? not with these unlocked gates
and twine still swinging from the post some signal

inside she clings to the ceiling keys rattle her
ribcage this gives it all away

on the road wheels are where wheels coil
shortening land shifting sight

she stays away from all things round

            the bed-bound years of Margaret
            lifted after the sheet-wrapped words
            and coming home in sweat she evaporates
            in the middle of the road

"I will give all                I will            I will console
I will pour abundant                        I will
I will give to                I will and will find”

four years under rotation beneath rumbling

            pulled along aside the carriage
            she turns from his stomach again

sound of running in the distance and
spilling something any breathing heard
recedes into distance

any cleaving any bowing any warped wood
she grows over groans over turns into the mud

Ohm Opera      Eric Baus                                                    (return to top of page)

What unvoiced signal does it wake, a rendering vacuum or rhetorical fold? Out among the twinned digits, newly invented medicine, in the shape of dizziness, dropped across lips. Lest night retell its s, clouds elide into dots. Painting the king painting the plains is to feel the sea in sod. His song ends too, an outbound breath. What is the name of this gesture? How to read its residues?

[We Married on a Westbound Cargo Train]      Shane McCrae         (return to top of page)

We married on a westbound cargo train

Because it was a dance we married dancing

We married on a trestle between two cit-

ies one the dancing one     the other dancing

We married in the dancing city on

A long long summer night the celebration

None of the dancing people left their cit-

y for the dancing one     the celebration

We married on a long     unbroken line

The singer played a Wurlitzer     the drum-

mer played the drums     the bassist played a stand-

Up bass and the guitarist didn’t come

We married as the song we’d paid for end-

ed     because it was a dance they played again

Geese Rising      Mary Hickman                                                      (return to top of page)

Bring your middle to V isosceles, which is also a passage into experience. Where you become bees acting like
geese wings, really pins, and lock your waist into sky (arias!) and more silver, really chalk, that charts birds
ascending in a V of voice. Imagine cantilever of breath and release. Where you strive to be at perfect rights with
their aerial beaks.
If you will carry me, she says.
If you will carry me, the geese repeat, and you should echo.

from "Wool and Wheel"      Emily Krag                                       (return to top of page)

Growing up, I watched my mother after dinner, or over tea, or during Sunday morning family time, preparing wool. Fleece is more easily spun when the fibers are worked loose, lined up, and the debris removed. Expensive, show-quality wool comes from sheep that live their lives in tidy paddocks, their fleeces growing cleanly under protective jackets. Most sheep, though, live in fields that have a field’s normal inhabitants: dirt, dung, twigs, grasses, and seeds. These are the fleeces my mother buys. She pulls loose a chunk of fibers and her fingers pick out the largest bits of debris, dropping them into the tea towel on her lap. She lifts her carders, flat combs lined with fine wire teeth, gently overlays one with locks of wool and rests it on her leg. She brushes smoothly and firmly across the fibers with the other carder—stroke, stroke—and the sound is of a thousand small wire teeth touching across each other with a pad of wool between. It is a surprisingly gentle sound, rhythmic, loosely pitched and slightly muffled. She pauses to pull bits of soil or weed stems from the wool, and when the fibers are lined up evenly, she works them loose from the carders in one flat pad and rolls it up like cinnamon bun dough. These ready-to-spin bundles are the size and shape of a sausage, and that is what my sister and I used to call them, but my mother calls them by their real name: rolags.

Some Sunday mornings, my mother made only rolags, and the stroking and swiping and pausing to pull unwanted bits was what I heard while she filled her basket with tidy sausages of wool and we all talked or my father read aloud. I remember Black Beauty, and Oliver Twist, a biography of Wilma Rudolph and the children’s version of The Voyage of the Beagle. Always my father did the reading so my mother could work with her wool. He reads to her still, and so every sweater she has knit is filled with stories and ideas and love.

If enough rolags filled her basket, the sounds I heard were the wheel pulled close to her chair, the basket moved to her side, and the first spin of the wheel with her hand, her foot following the motion of the pedal, working it into a rhythm.

My mother’s wheel turns without squeaking, but it does not turn silently. It is a rocking chair sound, smooth rolling, up and down—no clacking, no tapping, just the constant wooden noise of a pedal-turned wheel. It is a lullaby, a constant, gentle humming. Occasionally my mother’s hand stops the wheel so she can take a drink of water, or the pedaling slows while she plucks a stubborn bit of grass from the wool and drops it into the towel on her lap. Otherwise, the whirring of the wheel remains constant. When she is finished spinning and it is time to move on to other tasks, there is the sound of a door opening and the tea towel being shaken, snapping debris into the bushes.

Growing up, listening and watching, the motions of carding and spinning embedded themselves in my consciousness, rhythmic, repetitive, sensory, and soothing. For hours I listened to the sound of my mother’s carders or watched the hypnotic give and take motion of spinning: her hand pulling away from the wheel, the puffy fibers between her fingers twisting into strong yarn, her hand’s motion reaching its zenith and moving back toward the wheel, letting the spun yarn wind onto the bobbin. Pull away, give back, pull away, give back; and under it all the push of her foot on the pedal turning the wheel smoothly and steadily.

                                                                                   *

The Sanskrit word for spinning wheel is sutra chakramaha. The literal meaning is thread wheel, or circle, or cycle. Out of the context of “spinning wheel,” the two Sanskrit words have much more significant meanings. Chakramaha comes from chakra, literally circle or wheel, figuratively the basic energy centers in the body, which also correlate to levels of consciousness and the archetypal elements of nature, rotating wheels of life energy. Sutra is not just “thread,” the root of our surgical word suture, but “sacred thread.” Sutras are specific thoughts used meditatively to more fully connect the body and mind with threads of pure consciousness. Practicing the Yoga Sutras means bringing the mind again and again to the sutra, letting the thought appear and disappear until the appearing and disappearing are the same—pure consciousness fully exalted, and the connection between mind and body fully established.

Like the repetitive motions of carding or the pull and release of spinning, the sutras settle and calm. The mind, given something to rest on, is allowed to spread vast and free, infinitely expanded and non-linear. The Yoga Sutras say that when one reaches this state of expansion, nothing is beyond comprehension. The mind can understand the simple and the complex, the infinite and infinitesimal, the perceptible and the imperceptible. All can be known and seen and experienced, and the sounds and sights and smells are absolutely present, purely perceived.

Mahatma Gandhi spun cotton on his charka wheel for 30 minutes every day, not only for the political statement of independence from the British textile industry, but because he felt that spinning was a sacrament that helped turn the spinner’s mind “God-ward.” Centuries before Gandhi, yogis held that a person’s level of awareness was reflected in their reasons for spinning, and the highest awareness was spinning as pure meditation. In an age when spinning is an unnecessary task, perhaps this is one reason for its continuance. When the wheel begins turning, our hands know their motions without trying—pull and release—and the fine thread of wool forms itself between our fingers. We become inwardly still even in our motions, our minds slipping edgeways, rippled like the surfaces of water.

Of course, the metaphysical experience is only part of the joy of spinning. At some point there is the satisfaction of having enough fiber spun to set the wheel aside and pick up knitting needles or move to the loom. There is the joy of knitting or weaving something that is both beautiful and useful. There is the satisfaction of holding the finished product up and thinking, “here is something entirely of my own hands.” It may be lumpy, full of character, or it may be fine and intricate, but it is self-sufficient, and yet very much inherited. The shades of ancient fiber artists peer over the proud spinner’s shoulder and nod encouragingly. If you’re lucky enough to live near other spinners, perhaps even a modern wool guild, there is the joy of sharing this work with others who understand what it is you’ve done, or, better yet, can teach you more or better ways of doing what you do. There is the joy of delving deeply into something that makes your own hands so happy.