Autochthony

She was snagged at birth.

A gossamer thread,

Spun it was said from

The crosshatch quilt of

A lineage worn thin

By the rupture of ages.

Restive, she unpicks the tangled map

That keeps her in bonds and furnishes warmth:

A pupa wrapped in the swaddling arms

Of the unaccountable dead. Secrets

Go west, beyond range and scale; the furies

Of unearthly recrimination howl

With the wind and hail. She is going back

To the beginning. The ground whence she came.

Unthreading herself, and with her the world.

January 2014