Poetry Thursday - Thread by Jonathan Galassi

Thread

BY JONATHAN GALASSI

Heartworn happiness, fine line that winds   

among the tapestry’s old blacks and blues,   

bright hair blazing in the theater,

red hair raving in the bar—as now

the little leaves shoot veils of gold

across the trees’ bones, shroud of spring,   

ghost of summer, shadblow snow, blood-

russet spoor spilled prodigal on last year’s leaves . . .   

When your yellows, greens, and yellow-greens,   

your ochres and your umbers have evolved   

nearly to hemlock blackness, cypress blackness,   

when the woods are rife with soddenness   

(unfolded ferns, skunk cabbage by the stream,   

barberry by the trunks, and bitter

watercress inside the druid pool)

will your thin, still-glinting thread insist   

to catch the eye in filigreed titrations

stitched along among beneath the branches,   

in the branches where it lives all winter,   

occulted fire, brief constant fleeting gold . . .

Jonathan Galassi, “Thread” from North Street and Other Poems (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). Copyright © 2001 by Jonathan Galassi. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: North Street and Other Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2000 2001)