It was in his paternal grandparents’ cellar where he first felt the sense of thread, when standing, a small boy, and hearing his grandpa at his treadle sewing machine around one bend of the cellar; and suddenly the boy knew a sense of thread going through him, starting on his left, passing through him, extending to the right and going on and on and on….  The thread seemed to come from an impossibly long distance (the stars?)  The boy knew right then, five-six years old, that no matter how pulled or plucked the thread would remain intact!  He knew that thread, tough and fragile at the same time, as the line of individuality that he was and would remain.

---

---

First Love

To first love the poem because it is.

To first love the poem because it is
as skipping rope is to a child with no need to ask

What does this mean?

And if the poet is a woman hearing yips in a tall
meadow where no fox rises

what then?

And if the poet is a man living among ghosts
and now begins to hear them

what of that?

To repeatedly love the poem because it is
refusing to solve its mysteries for you

even if your questions adeptly fit.

Ghosts or poems won’t reappear
until inside you is a meadow where

for now an animal may skip in the tall.

First love the poem because it exists
to repeatedly love it as it resists.

Then the poem rests. Rests until it it sets out again

with rope-slap rhythms, yips, grass

swaying, and ghosts parking within you

whispering, whispering

A poem resets the distance between head and heart.