Barbara,^[1]

 

It’s stupid to spend my summer drinking beer and knitting wool,

warped humidity held, we’re outside and my lemon yellow

 

friend climbs the pergola, her fingers tendril trellis. Wisteria, too,

its roots are grounded, the art critic says of allover painting

 

(lattice, nets, rows), in vernacular practices, previously

feminized domesticity, non-sexist.^[2] “Non-sexist?” I press

 

into the pattern, an allover fabric, “like wallpaper,”^[3]

I say of its texture, isolated vertical panels

 

and a good deal of lateral stretch. Like modernism,

he scoffs, but I am only working in response to bing cherry

 

stems purled on my tongue twenty-seven aromatics flush

OFF! Deep Woods, and your garden fruit flies find tart sweetness

 

on my fingers cornflower blue yarn dampens. “Missouri,”

I say, “in July.” It is after midnight. Suppose I return

 

home before the wash sours, tumble dry fold, before wrinkles

settle into my own bed, wake to make coffee and scramble eggs,

 

wait for my children to rise. Still, there is space on the couch inside,

and I look up at my friend whose skin shines through knit eyelets

 

like a kaleidoscope, I’m interested in the fragmentation,

I say, in the dropped yarn and empty space where you find give.