"In hindsight" is a small phrase, but it sets the terms for everything after it. What follows is a shopping trip as it is remembered, with the details sorted and softened by time. Houndstooth, the broken-check pattern of the title, is a fitting emblem. It is "Hidden, yet hinted," the kind of design we stop seeing because it has been around so long, "numbed to normalcy amidst the / Mundane modes." The poem's quiet argument is that ordinary things, like cloth and the afternoons spent browsing it, sink into "the fabric of times spent." Making something by hand is a way of drawing them back up.
Sound does much of the work. There is no rhyme scheme and no steady metre, and the lines are as uneven as offcuts, some a single word ("Fleece," "Intertwined"). What holds them together is dense alliteration and consonance, a repeating pattern of its own, much as houndstooth repeats a jagged shape. Listen to the h's of "Hidden, yet hinted," the p's of "Part of a pattern / Paisley, pen's stripes," the t's of "Tailored, tinted, tinged." Wordplay slips in too. "Pen's stripes" edges toward pinstripes, and "Stripped of sophistry" echoes the sound of "stripes" just before it, as if the pattern were shedding its pretensions. Likewise "Fleece" is followed at once by "Fleeting," one word rubbing off on the next.
The middle of the poem is a catalogue: "Twines, burlaps, leathers / Lacework, cotton, vinyls, esters / Bamboo, wool, alpaca." Plant, animal and synthetic materials sit side by side, and "esters" is a chemist's word tucked among the craft supplies, which suggests an eye that takes in everything. The speaker's looking is described as appetite: "Fleeting feasts for famished eyes," "Eagerly craving creative styles." Later the speaker will "garnish my treasures," a cook's verb where we might expect "gather," so the food language continues into the purchase itself. The list of goods then turns personal with "a print / Reminiscent of grandma's old curtains," the first moment the shop openly stirs a memory.
It is striking that the speaker is absent until "my coins." Everything before that is observation, and the "I" arrives only with the money. Then comes the poem's one rough texture, "An abrasive old madame, tired of another day." Among all that wool and alpaca, the cashier is described as coarse, and her weariness is the grind of routine, the "mundane" the opening warned about. The speaker's escape is marked by the word "abrupt" and by the indented lines that follow, which slow down to "the sweet muffled tones / and scents of linens." The indentation works like a pause for breath, and the sound seems dampened by the cloth itself.
The ending changes the poem's mood. "Handicrafts await!" is the only exclamation mark, and after it the possessives pile up: "Me and my singer / My crookneck and twin pins / My loom and wheel." The tools are named like old companions. "Singer" most likely means a sewing machine, though the poem never says so. Then the final line gives the poem its meaning: "The workshop where my memory's quilts are sewn." A quilt is made from scraps, and the poem has been gathering scraps all along, in swatches of pattern, a pair of curtains and a sweater, knit. The shop is where fragments are collected and the workshop is where they are joined. Even the diction moves in that direction. Early on the fabric is "Cuts, measured, hewn," and the poem closes on "sewn," a word that looks like an echo of "hewn" on the page but means the opposite action, joining rather than cutting.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it enacts what it describes. Its short fragments, repeated sounds and lists of materials are themselves a patchwork, and the form is the argument. It also finds feeling in an unglamorous place, a fabric counter with a tired cashier and a plastic tray for coins. It suggests that memory is not stored whole but pieced together, and that craft is one way of doing the piecing.