How Something So Thin and Small Can Catch Something So Large, She Looked at Me as if in Wonder

 

A line on which letters

flow and curl

to catch your breath and eye,

the delicacy of an arachnoid leg,

its sole, ankle, calf, and thigh,

to pin and plot and map

 

with the finest of the rifts

which pull and tie

as if it too sought to compete

with Pallas’ subtile weaving art—

sub tela—written finely—

under a cobweb’s geometric loom

 

for text was once a woven thing,

logos or speech by tekne

was to whirl and twine

rays by rays arrayed

and catch the lightest beat,

heart’s finely strumming pulse.