For months I'd been holding this piece of Franz Wright's poem "June Storm":

“Voices from the first dark heartshaped green of summer

leaves, rain;

birds' “

It was June when I started this quilt. I was in Nebraska. The heartshaped greenness of fields and catalpa trees was a sensation I wanted, for as long as possible, to keep living in. Quilts are seasonal for me; I may sew the top of one in the spring or summer but it's not til it gets cold that I sit under it and hand-stitch. In Louisiana, that window is short. I knew the green would be with me for months. At the time of conception, I was reading William Bronk's Life Supports. He kept talking about shapes. Sawtooth stars have always been my (and everyone's) favorite quilt pattern, but they were too symmetrical and steady, neither of which I felt at the time. 

". . . lift the fragments for a little while,

hold one against the other, say no more

than, being here and now, untold, we build

a design of fragments to entrap the world." -Some Musicians Play Chamber Music For Us

Edges were necessary, corners, angles to hide in. When walking around I stepped in a patch of bur seeds. The bur seed on my sock was a faint pain; I carried it with me across the street; I carried a corollary future; the future was painful. When it came time to quilt, I didn't want clean lines.

"You find the vulnerable game of your desires.

. . .

Your gentle body flows in a single line,

resistant as rubber.

Who shall compress you, ever from your own shape?" -For Tom As A Wrestler and Hunter

Spirals kept appearing to me via green lacewing eggs on the front door, a red glass ring from an estate sale, cabbage. The idea of an epicenter, a "center of mass" that reverberated outward was interesting. I picked a point. Then kept expanding. Part of going to Nebraska was that I wished to reach the heart of my country, to go inland, having mostly lived at the edge. "My country" which daily perplexes me. 

Things happen while I stitch—near and far, violent and sweet, involving guns and neighbors, confusing things, wretched things, that make you feel impossibly small. The stitching allows reality to steep, a way of processing. While I make the subtlest forward motion.

"to see again and more, a shape outside,

of a world beyond our world which holds our world,

as music, we know, has seen in certain lines

that are and are again. There is that world." -Music That Sees Beyond The World

Oddly, time spent making thousands of small stitches feels essential to my center, seems to elongate time. It satisfies me what my hands can accomplish. Instead of expanding ever outward, I actually feel held (like a small shell) when I look at my quilt.

2025, Bur seed quilt