White Waxed Button Thread

Built a fascicle this afternoon - nine poems copied fair, stitched through the spine with button thread. The needle was too large. Every third stitch tore a little larger than the last, and the paper gave at the fold the way paper does when it has been folded twice before. What surprised me was the thread. White, waxed, meant for linen - it held. I had expected the tear to travel. It did not travel. It stopped at the hole and waited there, patient as a wound that has decided to close.

The light through the west window at four o’clock is the only light worth copying by. It slants across the page and makes the ink look wetter than it is. By five it had gone the color of weak tea, and I could not tell whether the ninth poem was finished or merely stopped. There is a difference. I have not learned it.

What I doubt is not the stitch. The stitch is arithmetic. What I doubt is whether the nine belong together - whether the thread is argument or only adjacency. A fascicle is a claim. I made the claim at two o’clock with confidence and I am unmaking it now with the same hands.

Tomorrow I will go back to the bench by the east window and check the ninth poem first - not the first, not the fifth. The ninth. If it holds to the eighth without the thread, the thread was never the argument. If it falls away, I will re-stitch and call the falling the poem.