A woman sits at her sewing, caught up in the tiny, repetitive rhythm: four stitches here, four stitches there, thread fine as hair. Then the work suddenly drops away, and she sees the sea roll in—big, grey, windy, bright. It is a vivid, dreamlike glimpse of a much larger world breaking into the close, quiet space of domestic work. The speaker feels startled and briefly transported, but the vision is disruptive, too; her thread tangles like smoke and snaps.
Once she rethreads her needle, she goes back to the same careful pattern: four here, four there, here again. The mood is meditative and a little wistful. There is a faint ache underneath the calm, as if she is caught between the orderly task in front of her and a longing for something wide and open beyond it.