Mustapha and Son

– Founded 1920

Backbone curved like a fish, the son hunches
over the old Singer in his dead father’s shop,

the machine humming a tune, Takadoom Takadoom Road
outside of time, a clattering Arabic on cobblestone,

wooden carts with pyramids of oranges bright as planets.
His world’s inside, brocade, crinoline, blue crepe spread out

like a thin blue sky. Disorder on his sea floor, remnants hairy
as seaweed, accidentally alive. Empty spools, a tumble of foam.

Not much has changed, not the ritual of tarnished pins
reappearing in the tin box, not the musty tapestry,

still a little on fire. When a crate arrives with twenty bolts
from Fez, he signs his name with X.

Cotton from Cairo, passages back to the Nile, the wheel.
Alone now, he chalks and cuts as a child would cut

along lines for a house or a horse, snaps thread with his teeth.
His father’s hands were like a pianist and when he pedaled,

the thread recalls, he made stiches so small they could fasten
two atoms. But the son’s are wild birds, burlap-rough

to guide damask thick as tongue. Gold scraps
of light pass through the corrugated roof,

glaze the needle and its strange oblong eye.
To reprimand or give consent.

Maureen Micus Crisick’s poetry has been published in Poetry, American Scholar, The Sun, The Minnesota Review, Journal of American Medicine (JAMA), River Styx, The Gettysburg Review, and The Poet’s Companion (W.W. Norton & Co.), as well as fifty other journals and magazines. Her collection of poems, Night Train to Budapest, was published by Middle Tennessee State University as winner of their Poems & Plays chapbook contest. She received an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University and has been a resident fellow at Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat in Scotland. She taught poetry and American literature in Morocco under a Fulbright Fellowship in 2000-2001
and now resides both in Morocco and in California.
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