Up Here Weaving

by Cynthia West

Nobody values the dark at the top of the hill
after the moon has set.

She harvests it anyway, stirs it
in her basket of raven feathers
until it sings of the undersides of stones
and of skeletal cicadas left unseen.

If anyone knows she is up here weaving
with the fingers of dead piñons,
they don’t care.

Silently, she gleans the bitter snow
in which her scars find rest.
With black ears and eyes she listens to the wind,
crawls down the cedar roots.

Finding food in bark scattered
on the stones, she grows trees from emptiness.
With dry stalks she forges sounds, scrapings
too faint to be heard. The sky gathers her,

whispering, “yours are invisible songs,
the kind no one pays money for,
the kind that keep me turning
after the moon has gone”.