Shadows of your hands in firelight

            By John Hollander

                 115-116

Arachne spies by the door on wise Penelope

To learn what will be her own undoing. By lamplight

She sees the busy shuttle going back on itself

With a more favulous skill than when, that afternoon,

It had been proudly building the fabric of a shroud.

Taking apart the cover of darkness fabricates

Light, and Time itself goes forward by unravelling:

So the queen's dismembering hand weaves te images

Of faith and remembrance on the bared warp of her loom.

Arachne ignores the lessons of nay-saying that

Lurking in what she sees there in the midnight's uwrking.

Her eyes are only for the energies of result,

Of what is spun out of oneself in devout silence.

Such emblems of old craftiness that are clear enough

Still to read, point to the one step forward, two-and-a-

Half steps back that everyone eventually gets

Used to. Now you sit on that red prayer-rug, undoing

A dark scarf, skeining the wool in puzzlement, as if

The process should not be still continuing, nature

Having forgotten when to stop, knowing it too well.

But we need not despair of negations: bits of yarn

Snipped far too short for knitting were tied, knot after knot,

Onto the warp and weft of some anatolian

Frame, shunning all human figures for the intricate

Shapes, “purely decorative,” geometric, that lie

Refigured now with shadows of your hands in firelight.

                                                                                                  Fancy-Work

From Powers of Thirteen, in John Hollander, Selected Poetry (1993).