The Loom

My brother, the god, and I grow sick     Of heaven's heights.     We plunge to the valley to hear the tick     Of days and nights.     We walk and loiter around the Loom     To see, if we may,     The Hand that smashes the beam in the gloon     To the shuttle's play;     Who grows the wool, who cards and spins,     Who clips and ties;     For the storied weave of the Gobelins,     Who draughts and dyes.     But whether you stand or walk around     You shall but hear     A murmuring life, as it were the sound     Of bees or a sphere.     No Hand is seen, but still you may feel     A pulse in the thread,     And thought in every lever and wheel     Where the shuttle sped,     Dripping the colors, as crushed and urged -     Is it cochineal? -     Shot from the shuttle, woven and merged     A tale to reveal.     Woven and wound in a bolt and dried     As it were a plan.     Closer I looked at the thread and cried     The thread is man!     Then my brother curious, strong and bold,     Tugged hard at the bolt     Of the woven life; for a length unrolled     The cryptic cloth.     He gasped for labor, blind for the moult     Of the up-winged moth.     While I saw a growth and a mad crusade     That the Loom had made;     Land and water and living things,     Till I grew afraid     For mouths and claws and devil wings,     And fangs and stings,     And tiger faces with eyes of hell     In caves and holes.     And eyes in terror and terrible     For awakened souls.     I stood above my brother, the god     Unwinding the roll.     And a tale came forth of the woven slain     Sequent and whole,     Of flint and bronze, trowel and hod,     The wheel and the plane,     The carven stone and the graven clod     Painted and baked.     And cromlechs, proving the human heart     Has always ached;     Till it puffed with blood and gave to art     The dream of the dome;     Till it broke and the blood shot up like fire     In tower and spire.     And here was the Persian, Jew and Goth     In the weave of the cloth;     Greek and Roman, Ghibelline, Guelph,     Angel and elf.     They were dyed in blood, tangled in dreams     Like a comet's streams.     And here were surfaces red and rough     In the finished stuff,     Where the knotted thread was proud and rebelled     As the shuttle proved     The fated warp and woof that held     When the shuttle moved;     And pressed the dye which ran to loss     In a deep maroon     Around an altar, oracle, cross     Or a crescent moon.     Around a face, a thought, a star     In a riot of war!     Then I said to my brother, the god, let be,     Though the thread be crushed,     And the living things in the tapestry     Be woven and hushed;     The Loom has a tale, you can see, to tell,     And a tale has told.     I love this Gobelin epical     Of scarlet and gold.     If the heart of a god may look in pride     At the wondrous weave     It is something better to Hands which guide -     I see and believe.