After the Market Packed Up
Thursday evening, the square swept bare,
one donkey, one man counting coins.
The quiet after the selling
is the colour of this rug.
By five on a Thursday the market in Boujad has gone. The stalls are folded, the last mule is loaded, and the square that was a roar of voices and chickens and bolts of cloth at ten is swept bare, with one man still counting coins in a doorway. Weavers see both halves of that day, and this rug belongs to the quiet half. Its tones are the pale ones, cream and the soft brown of unbleached wool, with the shapes set down lightly, almost shyly, across a field that gives the eye room to rest. Boujad can shout; this one does not. It is the rug for the room where you go when the day is done.
The pile is short and walked soft, and the rug is light enough, under nine kilos, to shake out on a balcony. It lives now in a painter's studio in Antwerp, on grey concrete between the easel and the window, and has learned to live with the odd drop of linseed oil.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.