Semaphore

During summers, one of my college professors

would make beautiful Persian rugs, and near

completion, he would tie nearly 

a thousand little knots in the fringe; I asked

him what he thought about as he was tying

them, so small he had to use a jeweler's eyepiece

to see his work. And he said without looking up,

Each knot is a hatred I have kept harbored

in my heart. I was stunned and looked at him

but he merely kept working. I pointed to a random

knot and asked, This one? He glanced at it and said,

That is my son's first wife, who left him and drove

him to sadness. I pointed to another; he glanced again

and said, That is mine, when I am ungrateful. Another.

That is the cafe owner, who never remembers my name.

I said, Surely there must be hundreds here.

One thousand three hundred seventeen, he said back.

My heart is vast and capacious, there are caverns of hate.

I went home, saddened. That night I dreamt

I was lost in a great cave, an underground

metropolis of spires and cliffs and outcrops.

On every surface - walls, floor, stalactite, 

stalagmite, pebble - was etched my name. 

I reached out to touch the lettering, and 

my fingers came away raw and bleeding.

The next day I had coffee with the professor

and said how sad I felt he must be.

Sad is not the word, he said, drinking slowly.

He set his cup down and looked me in the eye.

Think of the the thing you dislike most in yourself,

he said quietly. He waited. It was not hard, 

this thing was always just below the surface of my

thought and living. You have it, he asked, and I nodded.

Think of the next thing. And the next. Do you

see how their corners meet, how their fingers touch?

Do you hear the honey dripped from one to the other?

They are as salt to salted earth, as sand to billowing dune.

If sad is not the word, I asked as we shook hands 

in parting, then what is? Embodied, he said 

after a moment, and picked up his briefcase 

and strode off.

I thought about him for weeks after that day, 

his knots and his embodiment. 

I dreamt of fingers interlacing, of snowflakes

whose points melted into one another.

I tasted honey on my lips when I woke.

The thing below my surface grew and one day

boiled over and spilled its banks.

Weeks later, he called me, having heard of my

trouble. Why do you think I make those rugs,

he asked. It is to bind each hatred separately

and apart. When I tie each knot, I go back

into my memory and relive each hate, and it 

escapes through my fingers to be caught up

in the knot. It is twisted in upon itself

and cannot escape and return to me; it

consumes itself and immolates.

Sometimes it is hard to find the threads, 

and it must be left to ripen, for not every hate

is ready to be purged when you wish it.

Some hates you must live with, forever.

Some hates make your loves stronger.

It is up to you to know the hates you

can live within and beside, what you are willing

to sacrifice to make room for it. 

I have made nearly twenty rugs, he said,

in my life, starting when I was a young man.

The heart is cavernous, like the hollow earth.

It bears rivers, tides, rivulets.

It speaks the first tongue and knows itself

even if we do not. A phantom within a shell,

ghostly as the

half-moon

at the root of a fingernail.