The body of
the mother of
my body sits
small as a nutshell,
in the care-home bed.
Sometimes she hums. Some
times she smiles, wan and gentle.
Her room is bright,
her eyes are bright. Her hands—
frail tiny twig-bones draped
by crepe-pale skin
translucent over blue
and purple veins, all
softer than violets now—
never stop.
She spends her waking days
serenely strumming
at a knot.
She does not pull.
She does not pluck,
She does not tug or force,
and for the last four pages
of her Landscapes
of New Zealand Calendar,
She does not watch her hands.
The lilac colored lace-yarn
with which she began
months ago—crocheting something
. . . something
not recalled . . .
became tangled,
somehow, in the in-between.
The patterned piece she
stopped, too small for use: odd-shaped
for a blanket,
too large for
great
grandchild’s dolls,
rests to one side of her; the
wound-ball skein on
the other. Their knot-connection,
wadded clump of
chaos,
is large, and growing tattered, growing
fatter,
growing grayer.
The knot is its own texture,
its own mass.
Some days
the knot is tight, smaller than
her hands;
some days it’s loose, and larger.
This past March,
the knot-yarn color almost matched
the color of the ball,
and of the thing
she’s made.
Nine times or more, she has spread
that awkward rectangle
across her shrunken lap
(once the throne
of babies, lost or grown,
and lost again),
patted it, bewildered, sighing,
laughed, “I don’t know
what this is. Do you?”
In June, what is nearly gone
is any resemblance the knot
of yarn once had
to both its end and its beginning.
My mother works the knot.
One day I tried, so subtle,
to solve it for her; I cut the knot out,
spliced the yarn
where smooth lilac met with lilac; I
excised the offensive
mismatched useless fractious gray.
Within the week, my mother
had another
knot to work on,
to untangle and
retangle, steady work.
The children nod at
each other when we visit.
The knot now sips her
time, her persistent,
fluttering fingers like pale
hummingbirds hover near two
purple blooms
But only ever drink from the gray.
Oh lost one, let us cut
the thread apart!
We can’t save years of gray
rage ragged pain inflicted
or suffered to be suffered;
Hands and words and sorrows
and unyielding study
have frayed
the sinews, grayed
the colors
of a love that still could end
as we began—
That tangle, useless to make lives of
anyway, let’s throw out
for a simpler knot, a splice to imp the
broken wings
of hearts.
