three-strand hemp · weathered
no. 07 · bf-coll.
picked up by you because the colour matched the dry grass and you almost missed it. hemp, three-strand, an arm's length of what was once a much longer working life. the cut at one end is clean; the other has frayed to gold dust.
about thirty grams. stiff with salt; would not take a bowline any more without breaking. once it tied something to something — a buoy, a ladder, the gunwale of a boat at anchor. now it ties nothing. closer in retirement to the driftwood than to the working knots in the cabinet.
kept coiled loosely beside the lamp, where it gives off, faintly, the smell of a working harbour. read the knot wing on the same evening for symmetry.
field-note — unpicked, a single strand is the colour of a wheat-field in late october. rolled between palms it makes a small dust that smells of pier.