Jenny Joseph: Shawls

Jenny Joseph

Shawls

from Extended Smiles

1987

We walked in the garden as day lifted the sky and here and there on the dark hedges by white patches, fine wood stuff soaking wet with droplets that made them seen shrunken pieces of fallen mist, like little bits of out-of-place snow still solid when the field round it is warm and green again, finest fairy wood stuff pieces spread to whiten under the dry moon and caught by the danks and darks of night.

Only close up you see the thousand threads of the fabric, large cobwebs visibly engorged by the wet on them.

It was as if shawls of the lightest wool, the softest merino had been placed here and there, delicately with no pressure, no weight on tired bones, as when the gentleness of love puts with a light touch a fine scarf round frail shoulders, baby-soft fabric nestling up to gossamer wisps of white hair.

Some gentle love had floated down these drifts, these shawls of dew and they remained there undisturbed on the dark evergreen well into the clear day.