The Night Came Down Whole
Not a sky with stars in it.
The whole of the dark, folded,
and laid along the floor
so the room could sleep in it.
There are Beni M'Guild rugs in purple, in red, in orange, and then, once in a long while, one in blue. Not a blue with a pattern on it: a blue that is the pattern, four and a half metres of indigo and violet knotted so deep that the light goes into it and does not come back. Somewhere above Khenifra, in a house with snow on the roof, a woman decided that this winter she would make the night itself, and she did.
Forty years on, the surface has the soft shift of a dark sea, lighter where the wool has been walked, deeper at the edges where it has not. It is the rug for the largest room you have, the one with the long table and the tall windows, where everything else can be pale and quiet because the floor has already said it all.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.