Trichomes & holes that hold

The World is
as Soft as Lace

Mamma taught my hands to crochet:how a row of almost-nothing, looped and pulled, holds —the hook, the yarn, that deliberate hole the next stitch will hang from.Lace is the pattern of the gaps.And, a soft thing made of mostly missing can still hold its shape.

Wide Open

You wanted to be the loud flower in a field of grass.Swamp rose-mallow: a blossom wider than a face,pale pink, extravagant, flinging itself openin a wet roadside ditch, or standing solitary out in a bog —blooming in the open before you ever learnedthat loving the flowers was a thing a boy could lose for.

Turn the big grey leaf over. Everywhere, it is velvet:tomentose, the botanists say — felted,a leaf with the stiff heft of cardand the softest surface your hand will meet.You can’t resist bragging about the feel of it.Everyone gasps at the voluptuousness.

But the down was never tenderness.It baffles the small jaws, breaks the drying wind,shades the hard sun. The softest face in the fieldis the most defended. It only feels like love.

In Plain Sight

So you tried the other thing. You tried to be grass.Velvet witchgrass — green, upright, unremarkable,one more blade among blades, nothing to see here,practiced, plain, giving nothing away.

But slide a thumb up his stem and the secret spills.The whole of it is hair, down to the root.It hid what it was in the open and never lost it —did not scorch the fuzz off to pass, only learnedto wear the same plain coat as all the restwith velvet fur kept on underneath, intact.

III

The Husk

And then the hazel, which held nothing back.Soft the whole way down: down on the unrolling leaf,catkins hung out like little grey lambs in the cold,and the nut — the one hard thing it ever made —not hidden but cupped, swaddled, set in a deckled green husk,a downy house raised around the seed.

The hazel does not choose the soft over the hard.It folds the one inside the other, and makes the tenderthe very thing that carries the hard part safely down.

The biology was trying to teach youthe verdict you could not reach alone:the velvet is the armor.You did not last in spite of the softness.You lasted by it.

Do you want to be soft like me?

There is one flower I kept back for the end.Not a soft one — its leaves are ferny, ordinary —but it is the lace itself. Queen Anne’s,the white wheels along the highway shouldersall those drives to your grandmother’s farm,common as gravel, everywhere, unregarded:a flat white plate of nearly nothing,mostly air, mostly the holes between the florets,structured softness that still keeps its shape.

And at the dead center — look — a single dark floret,the drop of blood where the queen pricked her finger making the lace.The soft thing is not spared the dark; it carries it,the way the velvet cannot feel the hand that strokes it.

But the holes are how it holds.Make the lace strong, she said.Lie down flat on the velvet leaf —yes — soft like me —and be wide open.

For the botanists, knitters & anglo-music obsessives

The three velvet specimens are Hibiscus grandiflorus (swamp rose-mallow, its grey leaves felted beneath), Dichanthelium scoparium (velvet witchgrass / velvet panicum, hairy to the root), and the American hazelnut, Corylus americana (downy leaf, soft catkins, the nut in its frilled husk). What they share is trichomes — the fuzz, felt and down — which are genuinely the plant’s defenses: they baffle small insects, slow water loss, and turn the sun, and only happen to feel like tenderness to a hand. Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) is the exception kept for the coda: its foliage is ferny, not velvet — it earns its place not as a soft leaf but as the lace, the flat umbel that is mostly air, with the lone dark floret at its center.

Two songs are woven under the surface. The title is borrowed outright from Felt’s The World Is As Soft As Lace (Lawrence & Maurice Deebank, 1984); the question the poem turns to answer — soft like me? — is Saint Etienne’s, from Soft Like Me (2002).