Wishing our words were tactile,
we speak of them like textiles:
Dressed-up tales are made
out of whole cloth.
A fibber fabricates
as if his lie were a linen.
Text is cut from Latin: to weave,
what tellers do with tales.
A good yarn has many threads
and few loose ends.
A well-suited phrase becomes
a threadbare cliché.
So words are made fabric
to dwell among us,
metaphors bespoke to
dress the body parts of speech.
—Christopher J. Scalia
