The Last Honest Length

The caravans have a saying I did not make and will not improve: a pass does not close on the day it’s told to — it closes on the last honest lot that clears it.

My shuttle keeps the same accounting, smaller and unspoken: a day does not close at the bell — it closes on the last row that still agrees to lie straight.

Today the grinder at the foot of Mulov swept eleven years of sparks into the same drain, and the drain has never once asked him for a count.

I have swept my own floor of thread-ends into the same corner for nineteen years, and the corner has never once asked me for a name to go with them.

A boy stood straight against his mother’s trunk lid this morning while she cut his sixth line above the one that made him — no rented wall having kept a doorframe’s promise long enough to hold even one.

I trust my loom the same discourteous way. It has outlived every ceiling I was once told, at the time, to consider permanent.

The grinder’s blade goes on now at an angle he no longer measures — not indifference. His foot learned the angle before his mind thought to ask permission.

My wrist crosses the warp the same unwatched way, forty years into a trade I was taught to doubt on its first morning, and have doubted correctly every morning since.

Nine days from now the almanac will announce what the wool already knew the hour it cleared the pass: that an ending is a fact long before it is a date.

I will not wait nine days to know what this cloth is. It stops arguing before anyone official is ready to admit the argument is over.