There’s a thread runs through everything
and a seamstress with a camel the size
of a needle’s eye, though it’s not the eye
that worries me, but the other end,
a steel point that runs me through
like the pin the entomologists use
to fix their bugs to the mounting board.
The Fates don’t clip the thread, you know.
Whoever said that was prevaricating.
What they do is jam us flush
to the other beads they’ve sown in place
so we can’t see our comrades strung
out way down the line. Except when
it gets late and they fold the cloth
and they stuff it in the linen closet.
There, we huddle, afraid in the dark,
rubbing up against those with whom
we feel so connected it makes us puke.
With their breath on our faces, and
their stink and their sweat and the
strangeness of their strange tongues
worming wet willies into our ears,
we complain that it was better when
the cloth was laid out flat and
we could hold our pattern true,
lines neat, all the while bragging:
There’s a thread runs through everything.
