The Subtleties

“a seeming Silly, but subtil Fellow”

Under the warp, the finest threads—

A useful fabrication for

A beast used to fabricating,

We bend ourselves to making things

Including a world of shadows

Penumbral to the things themselves,

Weird world of all our words for things,

Our technology of meanings,

Meaning—we know how we make things

But don’t know how we shadowed them

With signs. A weaver knows her thread

But couldn’t begin to tell you

How her work wove itself through words

And idioms, while one who knows

Nothing of using warp or weft

May daily and freely deploy,

In one of many languages,

And even in casual cant,

Dozens of interwoven terms

And expressions that once described

Precise textile technologies—

Yet another way words are ghosts,

Wending through living tongues by dint

Of relevance to dead, lost things,

And then, too, these shadows refer

To all our things that never were,

Dream cloaks for God, for Creator.