::: SKIDROW PENTHOUSE :::

TO THE THREAD BY WHICH
EVERYTHING HANGS

I love you, Thread. May I never
cause you to fray.
Magnified by a high-powered microscope,
you look reassuringly thick.

I don’t know to what up high you are attached,
but I know you are attached. I look up and see you
disappear into the clouds, into the sun’s corona.
On solidest earth, I feel my feet
dangling beneath me,
like those of a lynch victim
having an especially lucky day.

I think even my idea of you
hangs by a thread, thinnest of umbilicals.

And did I say I love you? Rather, I adore you.
Thread, my goddess. May I give you a sex?
Powerful yet slender, a young warrior
guarding the old world against gravity.
Thread with breasts, thread with waist and hips.

I admit I’ve joined forces with another,
one like a goddess herself, and her
hanging here with me, our arms entwined,
complicates your burden, but feel
the lightness of her fingers’ touch on my skin,
how her buoyancy works to your advantage.

And now I whisper into your ears
the names of my children swaying in the air.
Please drop me first, Thread,
that I might teach them how to fall.

In the meantime I contemplate the physics
of your tensile strength the way a votary
contemplates a holy icon, the one, true relic.
All the many pretenders break,
and the world goes on.
But you, Thread, you
are the mother of all thread.

Philip Dacey