Figures in the Carpets

[SAROUK] We buy what we cannot control, the rugs, rhythm-makers, containing refrains of the oldest story: a man takes a journey. I have no stories inside me, he says, so travels on, to rest beneath a carpet of blue constellations, star patterns at the edges of disordered border walls. At the center, a meditative medallion makes a moving immortal-flowered ground: to live there is to give oneself over to greenness, redness, occasional blues, holding those spirits of woollen dyes rising from the knots within to breathe against the woven, multi-colored air. [BIDJAR] Now there is a coat of many colors hung around the wanderer's shoulders where he climbs out from that pit, down which he flung himself, or was thrown into. Reaching to soothe his wounds, he finds the dusts of centuries residing there beneath his feet, the hopeful travelers passing, wearing thin, fighting about how best to articulate the names of gods for whom they yearn—accursed by wars' helmet curves, shields, chained stitches of unmediated reds and yellowed husks of blood—broken lines marking a garden in whose precincts his journey began. [KAZAK] Three sunbursts spin, enigmatic energies through golden latchhooks, surrounding cloudbanks; three eagles, darting within their shifting images: they return him to streets of lit porches in summer dark, a boy stuttering over random syllables, a blindfolded man pleading for his life— whose fate is in the hands of some men whose fate is in the hands of other men, whose fate . . . until the whole pattern emerges, and the language becomes clear. On the floor lies his mother, moaning, until he comes out, guilty, before her— amid the mud of his own frozen blood. [SHIRVAN] To live inside such squares as the weaver of this green, becoming golden, labor; to pull back old skins and try to emerge, victorious, from that old prison after so many years, is to find a path back to harmonious designs, surely centered on the search—yet still speaking of a life with knotted figures seen as suffering variations on themes that can be inferred from small vibrations of weft and warp, the ‘snakes' within the threads worn down to the shapes of ribbons, even rhythms writhing in a loom of days: those humming ancient instruments whose music seems [SHIRAZ] raw as colors governed by the earth, pink as brick, or deserts scraped from rock, rough clay slowly grinding, then drifting down the slopes of the central plateaus to fresh respites from thinner regions of dessication fixed at the fringes below. These lands lie under the ache of desire, which calls feet out to play upon sand, to fill each new hollow, and dance about, tongues turning on the knots of umber, ochre, woven into those undulating waves others might summon in flowery manners to escape from bitter orange, still held by recalcitrant fingers, to the purple [KERMAN] empowering all those who try to hold on— as all things will hold to themselves an idea of themselves—to an aspiration towards good fortune, unwavering even unto death. Yet here are dusky passages, canopies of clearness, an everlasting understanding of the earth as cancerous points of coloration, acid starbursts, or dangerous blots—all blurring the way to move past sight: perspectives lost and found again, symmetrical, surrounded by the momentos one saves from travel, old friends, like hues that may betoken, in hopefulness, some changes of heart. [SENNEH] This creates a powerful language about how to levitate a plane—for even as the occasional murmurs of new machines are heard in the land, as old cyclic gardens arrange themselves in the whorls and tendrils throughout tilled fields, snakes hold up this world in variations of light blue skies above temptation. Even when an illiterate weaver mistakes an old date for the design, then dyes and binds strange numbers into a ground, the change of the serif, for instance, in a calligraphy of days marks the date of cartouches as mysterious, unknown. [KASHAN] Yet the signals from the borders suggest a different tale: lozenges are bottles strewn along mauve and terra cotta roads, shaped like a woman found lying along the side of those same roads—the figure of flesh, going nowhere but endlessly back on itself—as a web of years frames a dying kind of certitude, innocence. The birds in these cages signify singing, as the tapestries of perfected threads suggest reticence, chosen intermediaries to the indeterminancy of all creation: and we can buy it yet, articulate or not, with each new freeing of our hearts.