Yarn, Jeffrey Childs
Nuno Amado
Yarn
As if in moving even meekly
Through the world with a mind sharpened
By nature or experience there were
Moments of catching or being caught
In which, turn as you might, or merely
In standing still (for the world itself
Is motion) you felt the tug of something
In you unraveling, or in the world,
For in your unraveling the difference
Begins to fray, and saw the line spun
From your reeling play itself out into
The space in which a shadow dreams
Of sunbeams dancing upon your skin.
Jeffrey Childs is a professor at the Open University of Portugal and a researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon. Among other topics he has written on the war poetry of Randall Jarrell (“It was not dying: everybody dies, / It was not dying: we had died before”) and on the work of the contemporary poet Mark Strand (“In a field / I am the absence / of field”).