☀ Today's Poem: "Knot Work / Not Work / Knot Hole / Not Whole: A Mapping / Jishin-no-ben" Lee Ann Roripaugh

1.

Knot is a tangle, a problem that needs
unraveling. Not is the thing that isn’t / doesn’t /

wouldn’t. Knot a securing, a way of holding on.
Not security’s antithesis—a refusal to hold

or to be held. Lover’s knot / not lovers / all
for naught. Knotty pine paint paddles broken

in a splintered rage when spanking the non-compliant
child. Not I, said the spy. (Knot eye.) Not the eye

skimming smoothly up the trunk into blue sky,
but a knot eye, a visual paradox, a trompe l’oeil.

2.

Formed in trunks where branches used to be,
or where the trunk’s growth has choked off

the smaller, lower branches in a tree. Each knot
the mark of a tightening tourniquet surrounding

a phantom limb. Each knot a scar, a toughening
over to cauterize loss, seal the body shut so it doesn’t

bleed out in the snow. In a concentration camp
in Minidoka, Idaho, wood artist George Nakashima

learned to burnish the souls of trees through their scars:
their knots, their holes, their cracks, their broken histories.

3.

At the assisted living center your mother
is furious, says someone has snitched one of her lace

antimacassars. You envision unopened mail wedged
behind the toilet, her soiled underwear hidden

beneath the bed. You think of how clever her hands
used to be: deftly recuperating dropped stitches

in her knitting, untangling snarled thread in her lace
crochet. You imagine the sticky knots of plaque

blotting out words like dropped stitches in her brain,
her troubled neurons a snarl of neurofibrillary tangles.

4.

Burl’s the wood formed when a tree is sick
or stressed, causing the grain to arabesque

into strange spirals, distorted forms, eye-spotted
with visible knots. Burl erupts when infestations

of insects or mold spread unchecked beneath bark’s
façade, the burl becoming larger, more ornate,

as the tree continues to grow. They sound like tumors,
or eyesores, but burl’s actually expensive and rare.

A tree can’t survive without its burl. When burl
is cut from a tree while it’s still alive, the tree dies.

5.

Your mother’s mind is a scarred knot work
of missing branches, cratered-in knot holes—

leaving an emptiness she senses, fills with
the gaudy knick-knacks of conspiracy and delusion.

You think of scientists using mirrors to trick mirror
neurons into resolving phantom limb syndrome.

But as much as you efface yourself into shininess,
into neutral reflection—as if to try and trick

your mother’s pain into misrecognizing its own gaze
until it lifts away like burned-off fog—it never works.