Threads

I.
Something moves in the room that is not me
and not the room. Between the lamp and wall
a darkness settles — not the usual fall
of shadow but the dark’s own gravity
drawing itself together. Silently
the furniture becomes what things were, all
before we named them ours — before the call
of ownership. The room begins to see
I have been here. Not in this room — before
this room, in this attending. Not arriving
but arrived: the destination found
inside the act of looking. At the core
of what I thought was lost — surviving,
unlosable, beneath this very ground.

II.
Beneath this ground another ground is found —
the dark below the dark, the way the bark
conceals the tree the tree has made. The arc
of what they handed on — the unwound
continuous thread, the self’s most profound
connection — running through the ones who mark
their living on the world, and through the stark
loss when they go. The blood’s most ancient sound.
Through the ones who handed me their eyes
and said: this is the world — who ceased to exist
before I knew what I’d received,
and through the ones not yet born. The thread lies
along the bone, indifferent, will persist
after. It does not know that I have lived.

III.
And yet I am the way the thread can know
itself. The lamp, the wall, the dark became
the festival the thread made — and the same
thread is the lamp’s going out, the slow
diminishment of light. The final glow
before the dark reclaims its older claim
on everything. The body is the frame
the thread holds briefly — its own shadow.
The thread runs on. The lamp has long gone still.
The wall is dark. And somewhere, the soft run
of water under stone — the thread below
all naming, indifferent, and will
carry on through what has not begun
as yet. It carries what it does not know.