A Walk in the Park

To be born again, you need

an incarnation specialist—a team

from the Bureau of Needles

to thread you through—

Your next life

turns

on an axle of light—which Plato likens

to a turning

spindle—what was that?

I mean I knew

what a spindle was

from fairytales—how it could

draw blood

from a testing finger, put a kingdom

to sleep—

but what

did it actually do, how

did a spindle look

in real life?

I didn’t know. As with

so many things:

there was fact and there was

a believed-in dream . . .

Everyone had one back

in the ancient day,

spindles.

When we had to weave

our living-shrouds

by hand.

“A slender rounded rod

with tapered ends,” Google said. Plato’s,

so heavy with thread,

when viewed from the side,

looked like a top—

though most diagrams assumed

the hawk-lord view . . .

Moon thread, threads of the planets, earth thread.

Your thread.

Everyone else’s.

Nested one

inside the other, a roulette

machine—

If a thread could be spun from liquid light was what

I kept thinking—

imagining a sluice

of electric souls

between the earth wheel’s rims—

there “I”

was a piece of water, Necessity

wheeled it around―Necessity,