Mandorla Rising

Denim Blues - for Daniel

Honey! Your fire calling red tag
Levi’s jacket has new life. Who
knows how long you’d left it
on the wood peg by the door
among the venerable storyteller

tweed, the camping jackets and
your favorite Tilley hat? Drawn to
soft well-loved denim almost in a
similar way as I was to you! I took
it up one day, curiously fitting myself
into its wide sleeves and
too broad shoulders only to find
a gaping hole over the heart side
which no doubt led you to retire it
years ago but never throw it away. 

Like a story hanging in a cave,
a cloak awaiting its right moment
to be held, considered, voiced, told,
it just floated there, on ‘your side’
of the doorway….so long that
‘your side’ has now become mine.

Who knew it would take so much
daring for me to pick up
each item you wore? To commune
with each, cherishing its scent and
subtle heft in my hands? Most
jackets I immediately returned to
their peg-place clearly not yet ripe,
either in themselves or in me.
Some went swiftly into the giveaway box.
But this one, which I remember
around you, holding you, nuzzling
your neck, open and
shifting as you called fire,
this one captured me.


But I thought someone else
would be the one to sew or repurpose
it, not me. Sadly, I folded it up
into a box and there it stayed.
Through hours of sorting and avoiding
sorting. Through eons of days that
have made up this year beyond all
years. Through autumn and winter
into the pushing through of spring-
time bud by bud. Through the

deep interior indwelling of breath
honored ever more tangibly, more
respectfully, with more sanctity in
these months of sheltering
from Covid, from callousness,
from the hatred that killed George Floyd
body to body, that tore all our
hearts apart world wide in ways
that no one can ever repair
except with fully fidelious care.

Care that acknowledges wounding
for the truth that is, that pauses in
the stillness to absorb the sanctity in
scars, that opens its senses to the air
and now notices, as if newborn,
how fragile fresh air is, how vibrated
by greedy aircraft, how harmed
by sooty particles from millions of acres
of fires, how ragged and rugged this
life on earth, and how inevitable this
moment. As if to take down
everything now, everything rigged
and rigid, down, way down, off its
statued pedestals, its museum walls,
out of its antiquated error-ridden
frames. And so it seems it was with you
and this: You bid me, through the weaves
of this cloth you loved, the denim, longing,
calling, yearning for proximity to flesh
and blood, to song and bone. The denim
began to whisper, insistent as a late
summer mosquito sensing its time
was nigh…

Pick me up, make me new.

Refresh my soul, wear me in love.

Bring me alive through your hands
and with you. For you are my bride,
my always bride, for you will always
be my bride. Can you see? You can
do this. See what arises? From
ashes.

The whisper continued so constant
it became its own drone, a tone
almost imperceptible which none-
the-less built over a series of days
like a pond simmering with algae
bubbles when the sunlight is right.
And so it was that in a moment of
not-thinking I was drawn to the
small room where I found the box
with the jacket well-folded on top.
I lifted it and beheld you as I ever
so gently slipped it into my hands,
retrieved from the land of grieve

to save. From abandon
to have and hold. From neglect
to I will cherish you always.

I heard its song: Claim this place,

it sang. Claim this thing. This is yours.
This is your home.

Put it on. So I shifted
into its body, shouldering
its weight, having forgotten about
the tear, amazed I had ever made
this garment an orphan! Why
would I reject it? How could I neglect
to notice it’s every texture and fold
had brought you so much practical
warmth and pleasure and loyal comfort.
Its blues in gorgeous hues of indigo
and sky, its frayed places of rending full
of mystery.
Take this task, take it up while
there’s still time, it sang. While there’s
patience. While you still taste us.
So it was I found my heart clothed
in warmth, balance, more snuggly and
closely than I could have dreamed.

I listened to its wishes and went up
to the loft, called by my mother’s
sacred things to see if embroidery thread
might be among her sewing notions. Yes! 

Here. And down the ladder steadily,
with care, listening. Pausing
to bring thread and cloth together
in amazed delight to see how close
the colors wed. And then like tinker bells,
the needles called from their jumbled
place in the drawer amidst
unneeded medicines and beads
yet to be strung. There among this
place of findings, amidst the maybe
and maybe not, a lone darning
needle said: let me be the one!

And we sat for hours in the rocking
chair, as I found my way to stitch
the time, realizing as I began that
it was the one-year anniversary
of your return from the emergency
room, your last return home. They
had kept us there all day and sent
us on with a remedy that required
us to keep vigil all night. So we
watched Bohemian Rhapsody and
wept and wept and wept for the
music and the mystery and the
magic of living so fully in song
when one is called to court rhapsody
in this strong and tragic, fragile life.

And you let me hold you, wracked
with weeping, let me tell you all
about how it really was for me when
you’d almost died five months before.
Honey, you let me cling to you
like arctic ice must daily seek now
to hold fast to its ancient home,
slipping and resisting slippage until
it can cling no longer.

A whole year has passed now.
As I breathe and stitch and
feel into the every day between
that day and now, between you

and me and us. I look down
at my hands and with ancestral
satisfaction, growing stronger
with each stitch, I hear. 

I understand. I receive and honor
your geis: Weave this seam for
three days. Find a bead to make
the suture shine. Wear it well into
the New Year. For it will soon be
the Birthday of the World. And you
will have this old new garment
and me to shelter you and bring you
to the new time.
To hold you as you honor
my forever flight, my first yahrzeit,
and call a fire and let me go on
a little further, knowing I will
love you always, close and
from afar, watching you as
you rise and fall and dance
into the year arising, sure as
a needle through the cloth of time,
as my heart beats now
as earth herself, as your lips
part to drink in the blessing kiss
and greet this new year’s very first
shape of moon.

 —Judith-Kate Friedman

Poem & Jacket photos by Judith-Kate Friedman