Connection

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.