Love & Darts (9781937316075) by Nath Jones Page A

Rock to Port Jeff.
    Perfection. Uniformity. What nonsense and
bother for a woman who raised five kids under the moon and sun’s
tense constant dance of evasion. Why worry? Just make enough yarn
for all the sweaters, all the hats, all the knitted winter
days.
    During her breaks she handed out sandwich
cookies from special kitchen jars and was part of three hundred
familial years on that land against water. She could laugh, joke,
carry on, and tell stories until no one could breathe. Old ladies
don’t smell like smoke anymore. But with that strand of wool held
out at arm’s length and that pedal working over and over and over
and over she focused on nothing but uniformity. The pedal hit the
hollow wooden porch floor. And the waves hit the pummeled-nothing
sand. And the heat hit the middle-of-nowhere house roof. And the
steel flag clips hit the factory-made pole. And the bottom of the
sailboat hit her gravelly stretch of beach, got pulled up above the
endless tide line through innumerable presorted, shell-marked
graves. And the rubber-edged garage door pressed down softly
against moss and evening as it ended her driveway.
    She was caught spinning and was rhythm
witness to summer migrations. Rolling the thread up with two
fingers and dropping that spindle again she fed clouds into simple
machines after all the required rhythm to tease and coax oily
wool—full of seeds and twigs and leftover sheep curls—into
something useful.
    She lays some fiber on the bed of nails.
It’s called carding. Have you seen it done? Imagine holding two
pet-grooming brushes, one in each hand, used to pull hundreds of
slight-bent wires across each other and across the wool. Over and
over and over and over those wiry cards with handles got caught in
each other’s grip as her wrists flicked, her hands flipped, and the
wires yanked through a woolen puff until every tangled twist let
go. A childhood friend might ask why. The old lady in her housecoat
all zipped up modest and warm would answer, “So the little hairs
all go in one direction.”
    The kids never told.
    On the deck, where flag shadows flapped on
sunny days, the gray paint was hotter than such a light color
should be and rhythm feet ran up from their swims, from their
high-tide screaming cannonballs off barnacled jetties and their
9.5-rated Olympic swan dives off smooth-topped granite boulders
into her jelly fish-strewn seaweed waves. She didn’t have to look
up and look out to see all the cousins swarming Dragon Rock and
racing to find Swim. She heard those children playing safe in the
warm rain. She heard their rhythm laughter as they ran like a
troupe of high-wire performers through beach grass along the
blistering creosote-coated bulkhead. She heard their plans to sneak
up the cliff through wild roses. She heard them chase, race, and
pant at the hose rinsing off sandy feet before daring to come
inside onto her crewel rugs.
    Rhythm witness the slow heat of afternoon
sleep. Wakeful but dreaming. She didn’t care how many little eyes
watched the wheel go round or the wooden pedal pressing rubber down
over and over. Rhythm dunk lift and twist in the dandelion dye.
Rhythm dunk lift and twist all the wool-washing kinds of
preparation that she did out back in big steel pans of blue borax
water nested in deep, cool shaded sand near a feeder for birds.
Just like she did to rhythm dunk lift and twist ten swim suits at
the end of the day. Tart lemonade refreshed burnt-skin children
that stood watching the sun catch slow drips off the row of hung-up
suits. Rhythm breath and blinking.
    Huge screens inhale and exhale on
maybe-a-storm’s-coming breeze. Warblers pretend to be lost in the
grapevine. The smell of sandalwood drifts through the slow-tossing
briar and locust brambles as does the sound of laughter. Some loved
ones are playing cards.
    Up and down stairs. Up and down suns. Up and
down flags. Up and down drop-spindle, round and round wooden wheel,
spinning on, making wool, making sweaters,