Itinerant, these threads appear amid the weave

Itinerant, these threads appear amid the weave
this sturdy-seeming life affords; aureal strands
intervalled to salience from the drab; a dance
not understood by us, but done. Example: Leaves’
eternal shuttling between the branches & the worm;
renewed by death into the echelons, they return.

Ahistorical, we don’t notice the old currents’ return,
new as a day where antique generations weave
their hopeful accidents. Nonetheless, we learn
to hang together. Cords knit with many strands
hold tight, the ancients say and, if we try to leave,
entwine their arms in ours, inviting us to dance.

Sleuthing truths in books, the worn words dance
erratic in my eyes until the scales of sense return
to weigh proportions. We forage in quarto leaves
hoping for complex fruit among the rhythm’s weave
revealed, for lasting names to write upon the strands
Elsewhere, where seriphs hold the boundaries & burn.

All of our futures have been decided. A heavy burin
draws the lines, & yet imbues them with that dance
suffusing any partial thing. Fate, unfurling, strands
all of us in separate whorls, unable outward to return.
Perhaps my life’s isolated thread gleams in the weave.
Perhaps it doesn’t. Can I unstitch myself & leave?

Eventually every lovely thing must leave aside what shapeliness our touchings can discern —raw silk of skin beneath the starry weave— and make its dwindling bed amid the garden’s danse macabre. My threadbare selvage even shall return into new habits, knit from its own unraveled strands.

Day by layered day, I spin my crimson trail of strands
through citygrid, among the slowly coming leaves.
Here, steeped in the concrete, trampled days return
excavating me, leaving no scab unturned.
We live in our own ruins, labyrinthine dances,
entering knots we pray we can unweave.

All that we’ve felt is a fray of fumbled strands
veering into textured dance. The needle, hiding, leaves
ever to sojourn back behind the tapestry, and to return.