Pre-school, we clung to knots
in a long, thick rope
& made our way across the college campus,
orderly as a centipede.
Of our routes or destinations I recall
nothing, I have learned & forgotten
whole languages since then, but
that sense of my place
as node on a travelling rhizome
has stayed with me: I can still feel,
like the final consonant of some forbidden word
the tongue can almost taste,
that fibrous knot.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Bridge to Nowhere
- Natural Faculties
- (Re-)Claiming the Body
- Ceiling snakes
- Train Song
- Surgery of the Absurd
- Notes toward a taxonomy of sadness
- Weeding
- Blanket
- Forecast
- Curriculum Vitae
- Lullaby
- Fist
- On Reading The Separate Rose by Pablo Neruda
- Gibbous
- Song of the Millipede
- Autumn haibun
- Bread & Water
- Jersey Shore
- Initiation
- October dusk
- Goodnight moon
- Antidote
- The Starlings
- To the Child I Never Had
- Ambitions
- Learn Harmonica Today
- Two-line haiku
- Sleeper Cell
- Unchurched
- Turnips
- Homiletics
- Magic Carpet
- When the Wind is Southerly
- Connection
- Ground Beetle
- Étude for the World’s Smallest Violin