Close Reading Silk Poems page 88-98. Bervin explores Chinese characters derived from the word for silk.Bervin explores Chinese characters derived from the word for silk. On page 89, Bervin gives the example of the characters for "warp, weft, latitude, longitude, parallel, route". Each of these words evokes a direction that makes us feel grounded in the world around us. Though the silk worm seems at first like a stagnant creature that lives its entire life on a mulberry tree, it is actually because of the silkworm that these characters used to traverse the globe exist at all. Through comparing the warp and weft of a loom compared to the latitude and longitude of the earth, Bervin adds complexity to the image of a woven fabric and the importance of silk to do so. The enumeration of words also shows how much important language is derived from one word. Especially since Bervin writes poetry, and comments on using common language to evoke abstract ideas, she seems to almost weave a lexical fabric of words with interconnected meaning in order to give significance to the silkworm. I am curious what a bilingual reading of this poem would look like. Would this listing of words retain their poetic quality? I think my reading as someone who doesn't speak Chinese is probably different. For example the character for "weft" really looks like an image of a weft for me, rather than a word. I am curious how Bervin went about researching and choosing these words.