You are making
macramé at the kitchen
table. Along the long repository
of wood
you are darning your life.
At this table, in this hour
of making, your life
is a fixed hole
spilling, like waterfalls,
a crashing ping of knots,
a silence
where hitch knots accumulate
into flowers, where the knot
coils from its source, a knot without
a mother inside its head
saying, speak.
In another life,
you see yourself
emerging from a tunnel
—you pass your mother
(the echo of a train
remembered)—
on the iron rails, chugging
in the opposite direction.
She wants to tell you something.
She’s wildly gesticulating.
As from a dream, the words
garble, knotted in the throat.
Her hands puncture
the fabric of air.
She’s talking and the void
will not fill.
