Homework

In those last years she sewed mostly by feel.
The window by her chair did little for her;
late in the day she felt the sun lowering
and went on stitching, nodding with the rhythm.
It was a finely honed accomplishment,
something she took grim pride in. It was only
threading her needle that she needed help with.
Then the boy would put his book down and try
to spirit through the niggardly steel loophole
the slenderest of ends, which in his fingers
bulged as coarse and clumsy as a hawser,
butting the aperture it aimed to pierce.
The little eye itself would seem to wink
maliciously, repelling his rude stabs.
The thread slipped through at last as if by luck,
or in derision, finding its own way.
Slowly, with practice, he got better at it,
returning sooner each time to his homework.
Sometimes he wondered: what could it be like
to watch the prodigal spectrum of the world
narrowing like a peacock’s closing fan
until, all suns extinguished, it became
dull bunting dragging lines across the dust?
He thought of how, years younger, he had played
tourist in his own room with his eyes shut,
coming so quickly up against a bedpost
that he gave up, disgusted. Patience came later,
partly learned from the one who sat each evening
lining her steady rows of stitches up
against the dark upwelling. When he looked
up from the page at her in her dim corner,
then quickly back to it, his eyes would blur:
as if the graphs and characters he studied
had bled their precious ink to turn the busy,
columned page a sudden, solid black.
Then he would blink, and bend to the next problem.