What comes up on the cloth
is the refuse of mountains, light
years’ litter, glitter of stars.
And beyond that, the stuff of you
and me, the bus driver’s babysitter,
Incan kings.
In this taking up, shaking out
in salute to our ancestral universe,
we rise like smoke, incense
on common air. Red ochre
on our fingers, we mark our walls
with caribou and intergalactic ships
before shouldering our brooms.
