Lecture Notes

Oftentimes, a silver thread,

in space before you, floats— 

The even line wavers, a simmering 

horizon—How smooth the thread

passes through the hands, how 

not-burning the friction of contact—

You think, were you to grasp it, the thread 

would thrash a sudden impossible 

weight, throw you to the filthy 

ground like a piece of a refuse— a receipt, 

a toothpick, a—I don’t know—a pen—

Better then, to not clutch the silver 

but go on gazing the pleasant 

gleam like a glass of wine—Better then, 

you think, to gaze the pleasant with a glass

of drinking wine—While you’re away, pilfering 

the cabinets of the local, the thread performs

fantastical convolutions of knots, its silver 

gathers into silver bulbs resembling 

cuts of meat or fruit you'll never taste, nor

the yet more toothsome discrete unbraiding—Returning

with wine, the thread is exchanging

kind farewells with someone else

and hailing a cab, off 

to the city quarter you'll never afford—

Alone, you sip the local wine in space

where thread once was, pointedly 

un-silver—The wine is a brand 

your parents favored, its cloying thickness 

evokes childhood—mother, father, a house

in country with its beguiling wood, 

a climate, a century, the trouble stirred up

by psychoanalysts, life unburdened by silver

braids of change—and little else—