I love old rugs.
Rugs with animals, flowers, and small people.
Prayer rugs and large entrance rugs.
Rugs with dragons and monkeys.
Tiger-rugs.
Yes, especially tiger-rugs.
One day I will buy a house
and fill it with old rugs.
I'll put rugs everywhere on the floors.
And on the walls too.
And, perhaps, even on the ceiling.
I will lie down on a rug and listen.
The silence of a room covered in rugs is very different
from the silence of a room with naked floors.
I will listen to the rugged silence for such a long time
that I too become part of it.
I will shrink and disappear into the rug,
becoming one of its tiny people.
I will jump from rug to rug,
meeting its wondrous animals,
befriending a dragon,
fighting with a tiger.
One day, one of the flowers in the rug
will swallow me whole,
and something would change in the silence,
it would gain an extra stitch.
(The silence, not the rug.)