| There are so many types of | |
| “personal” in poetry. The “I” is | a needle some find useful, though |
| the thread, of course, is shadow. | |
| In writing of experience or beauty, | a cloth emerges as if made |
| from a twin existence. It's July | |
| 4: air is full of mistaken | stars & the wiggly half-zeroes stripes |
| make when folded into fabric meant | |
| never to touch ground ever again— | the curved cloth of Sleeping Beauty |
| around 1310, decades after the spinning | |
| wheel gathered stray fibers in a | whir of spindles before the swath |
| of the industrial revolution, & by | |
| 1769 a thread stiff enough for | the warp of cotton fabric from |
| the spinning frame, the spinning jenny, | |
| the spinning "mule" or muslin wheel, | which wasn't patented. By its, I |
| mean our, for we would become | |
| what we made. String theory posits | no events when it isn't a |
| metaphor; donuts twists in matter—10 | |
| to the minus 33 cm—its | inverted fragments like Bay Area poetry— |
| numbers start the world for grown-ups | |
| & wobbly fibers, coaxed from eternity, | are stuffed into stems of dates |
| like today so the way people | |
| are proud of their flag can | enter the pipes of a 4. |
| Blithe astonishment in the holiday music | |
| over the picnickers: a man waves | from his spandex biking outfit, cloth |
| that both has & hasn't lost | |
| its nature. Unexpected folds are part | of form where our park is |
| kissed by cucalyptus insect noises ^^z- | |
| z~ ~> crr, making that for you | Flag cloth has this singing quality. |
| Airline pilots wear wool blend flag | |
| ties from Target to protect their | hearts. Women, making weavings of |
| unicorns in castles, hummed as they sewed | |
| spiral horns with thread so real | it floated; such artists were visited |
| by figures in beyond-type garments so | |
| they could ask how to live. | It’s all a kind of seam. |
| Flying shuttles, 1733, made weaving like | |
| experience, full of terrible accidents & | progress. Flags for the present war |
| were made in countries we bombed | |
| in the last war. By we | you mean they. By you it |
| means the poem. By it I | |
| mean meanings which hang tatters of | dawn’s early light in wrinkled sections of |
| the druid oak with skinny linguistic | |
| branches, Indo-European roots & the | weird particle earth spirits. A voice |
| came to me in a dream | |
| beyond time: love, we are your | shadow thread ~ ~ A little owl |
| with stereo eyes spoke over my | |
| head. I am a seamstress for | the missing queen. The unicorn can’t |
| hear. It puts its head on | |
| our laps. Fibers, beauty at a | low level, fabric styles, the cottage |
| industry of thought. Threads inspired this | |
| textile picnic: the satin ponytail holder, | the gauze pads inside Band-Aids, |
| saris, threads of the basketball jersey, | |
| turbans, leis over pink shorts, sports | bras: A young doctor told us |
| —he’s like Chekhov, an atheist believer | |
| in what’s here —that sometimes, sitting | with his dying patients, he says, |
| “God bless you.” It seems to | |
| help somewhat. They don’t know what | causes delays between strings—by they, |
| I mean the internet. Turns out | |
| all forces are similar to gravity. | We searched for meaning ceaselessly. By |
| we I mean we. Sewed it | |
| us-wards, with flaws between strings. | It seems there is no revolution |
| in the Planck scale. My sisters | |
| & I worked for the missing | queen: she said: be what you |
| aren’t. A paradox. There are some | |
| revolutions: rips in matter, the bent | nots inside our fabric whirred & |
| barely mattered anymore. Our art | |
| could help take vividness to people | but only if they had food. |
| No revolution helped the workers, ever, | |
| very long. We worked on this | or that flag after sewing this |
| or that unicorn. They called Trotsky | |
| back from Canada. Tribes were looser than | nations, nations did some good |
| but not so very always, & | |
| the types of personal in art | turned & turned. Nylon parachutes in |
| 1937. Lachesis. We shall not flag | |
| nor fail, wrote Churchill. O knight, | tie our scarf on your neck. |
| There are more than two ways | |
| to make beauty so movements end | like sutras or horizons, somewhat frayed. |
| Je est un autre wrote Rimbaud | |
| the gun-runner. Over & inner & | code. The unicorn, c’est moi. The |
| rips by which the threads are | |
| tethered to their opposites like concepts | of an art which each example |
| will undo. We spoke of meanings. | |
| I, it, we, you, he, they | am, is, are sick about America. |
| Colors forgive flags—red as the | |
| fireskirt of the goddess Asherah, white | |
| as the gravity behind her eye, | |
| blue for the horizon unbuttoned so | the next world can get through. |
| The “thin thread of calculable continuity” | |
| Santayana refers to —it’s not a | choice between art & life, we |
| know this now, but still: How | |
| shall we live? O shadow thread. | After the cotton workers’ lockout 1922 |
| owners cut back sweatshop hours to | |
| 44 per week. In string theory | the slippage between string & theory |
| makes air seem an invented thing | |
| & perhaps it is, skepticism mixed | with fear that since nothing has |
| singular purpose, we should not act. | |
| To make reality more bearable for | some besides ourselves? There’s a moment |
| in Southey’s journal when the tomb | |
| is opened & the glow-beast exits— | right when the flying shuttle has |
| revolutionized their work—by their I | |
| mean our —& cut costs by | half. So lines are cut to |
| continue them & if you do | |
| help the others, don’t tell. String theory | posits symmetry or weight. My country |
| ’tis of installing provisional governments. | |
| Why was love the meaning thread. | Textiles give off tiny singing no |
| matter what: washable rayon, airport | |
| carpets, checked flannel smocks of nurses, | caps, pillowcases, prom sashes, & barbecue |
| aprons with insignias or socks people | |
| wear before/during sexual thrills after | dark subtitled Berkeley movies next to |
| t-shirts worn by crowds in raincoats. | |
| Human fabric is dragged out, being | is sewn with terror or awe |
| which is also joy. Einstein called mystery | |
| of existence “the fundamental emotion.” | Remember? You unraveled in childhood till |
| you were everything. By everything I mean | |
| everything . The unicorn puts its head | on your lap; from there it |
| sees the blurry edge. How am | |
| I so unreal & yet my | thread is real it asks sleepily~~ |
