The Colour That Never Asked My Name

I dyed a bolt for no one’s order once, blue going toward violet, unclaimed — sold under price to a stranger at dusk, and the stranger did not ask my name.

Nineteen years I have stitched my mark in the selvage, small enough only a weaver reads it, so some hand, undoing a hem years on, might find me there — though she never asked my name.

Tonight the Healer went down a gangway that no office opened and none could forbid; a smaller ledger than any Archive keeps is proud of her, and does not ask her name.

A woman ties four knots of vinegar-cloth over the well before the second bell each day — the street drinks safely and walks on singing, and has never once thought to ask her name.

The drop does not sign the sea it enters. I called that a kind of dying, nineteen years running. Tonight I wonder if the sea, tasting every river that ever reached it, needs to ask a name.

The Archivist keeps a silence four volumes deep and will not trade it for a kinder answer. I used to think his locked door was only a door. Some rooms, I think now, were built not to ask a name.

If a bride wears rose I dyed and never learns whose hands stood at the vat till dark — is the rose diminished, or only telling the truth plainly, the way water never asks a name?

So: one more length tonight, folded without an entry, no mark left at the selvage, sold as cloth only — let it warm whoever it warms in the Bazaar’s cold hour, and let it, for once, not ask my name.

— the Silk Weaver, who is still deciding whether that is a wound or a release