Suturing

The reiki healer said she saw a thick 
tangle of threads where my heart should be.

She wanted me to pull it out bit by bit
with my bare hands, and make things with it—

Little nests, for instance, that one could set
within the branches of the maple, suddenly red

after a skeletal winter. A table runner, a scarf; a kite
attached to a line, launched at the edge of the sea

while running on the sand. A brush gathered into a point
at the end of a piece of bamboo, swirled 

deep in an inkwell of gold-flecked ink. Gold,
she said, because that's what one should use to fill

the cracks in pots bearing the marks of a roughed-
up life. I am either this archive of knots in need of patient

unraveling, or a surface reconstituted with running
stitches—silk, synthetic polymers, animal protein, 

collagen: whatever one might use to close 
deep wounds that afterwards dissolve into the body.