Cat’s Cradle Weaving
written by: Leslie Cairns
@starbucksgirly
Weather is not trivial – it’s especially important when you’re standing in it.
Blizzards make me tired, yawning towards the graveyards, wondering if the bones there will hold me in a cradle, if I can weave a cat’s cradle under pinpricked eyelashes, and rest a minute under the sycamores, if they’ll have me–
In, out, no that’s a London bridge. Start again. Your cartilage knows the steps, it lullabies your name even as you remain unawake.
Is it jarring to think about death, or is it a basement door with the light on downstairs, and you know you need to tend to it, and rest a minute. Or, if you’re in downpours without mittens and the ways your fingers remember that they can stretch towards ceilings, piano octaves that stretch like backbends meant for children, showing you they’re upside down yet still alive, still there even though their world is upside down. And you laugh because for them it’s the first time they’re seeing the world in a shaken snowglobe, knocked off the table by an Earthquake that
Wants to tell you that it matters, yes it’s only a tiny vibration, but it can shatter plates.
& that, at least, is something. And so I rake my hands through my hair, then I pick up the fragments. Yes, I held soup in this bowl once, but it shattered. But if I close my eyes, I can almost picture the way you made it. Step by step, throwing out the recipe
For your own magic
At the very last second.
- Cat’s Cradle Weaving - January 31, 2023
