Prayer With Needlepoint

White lace hangs in a storefront window
as young women stop to admire pinned linens
folded over like ghosts & all I want to know
is why. Why white, why not fuchsia or red, maybe
a sari made by my grandmother on her Singer
from Sears, where she’s worked for forty years.

Back home, her brown eyes would burn
through the night in that dim room
where mornings came in with the steady drill
of a stubborn woodpecker tap-tap-tapping
& the new sun casting bursts of light
off the shine of her silver-thimbled thumb.

Remember the handkerchief, Nanny, the one
I brought back from Burano, all white with fine
lace borders hand-stitched in tiny painstaking pricks
by the wives of fishermen, women waiting
long months out on low sea-front stoops near
bright colored boats for their men to come home?

You held up the handiwork for a closer look
at the French-knotted yarrow & ivory slip
stitch of the embroidered “H,” the letter that
stood for your name and mine, the married
name you took. Then out of nowhere
you said it: You can bury me with it.

Now, outside your house, we sit holding
a pale pink dress, the one you were married
in, and you wonder aloud if you might wear it again,
you’re so thin, but it’s unraveling at the end,
so you ask me to help you make it a little longer.
 

We’re waiting for the doctor’s call, watching
the clock and the bob-tailed squirrel from our perch
on the front porch, like the women of Burano
clutching their handkerchiefs as they watch & wait,
watch & wait, until word comes the cancer
has spread, and they say it looks like lace,
the way it is delicately threading inside you.

Let me stay with you & paint your face
the way I used to, with powdered blush & baby blue
dusted gently over each eyelid. There’s some peach
ice cream in the freezer we need to finish.
We can take this hem out all the way, one more inch.