weave

dear dangling thread,

    the tapestry has changed so much since the time you were pulled away,

even since the time I cut you off,

trying to pretend you did not exist, had no place in the pattern

yet there you are.

I have seen great cords emerge,

wrapping all my life around them;

such that this is no longer just a tapestry, but a song.

(is it this music

that seems to be drawing you in?)

    do not think i do not see you hanging there;

the knowledge of that loose end has unravelled my pride.

(grating dissonance; will you not simply be gone?)

now and again, you have woven your own tapestries in my head

when i could not help but rest from my own weaving,

leaving the loom untended.

    i see the new pattern i have brought to pass;

i am happy with it, i say.

can i truly be happy with such a work?

knowing how easily you would be seen

were the weave hanging with its other side to the wall;

can i live with such a proclamation of artist's failure?

dear dangling thread,

    do you fit the new pattern?

a slip stitch here, and how the themes could flow into one another, and the first transformed;

what a masterpiece this warp could bring about.

but i have seen how the second theme has flowed from the sky like water, like rain;

do i dare risk the onset of drought?

are you part of the flow?

(theme. variation. theme?)


[with thanks to T. S. Eliot, with maybe a little Robert Frost on the side.]