My Mother’s Ghost Knits a Scarf of Chain

When I look up rust scabs flutter from your clicking
needles, subsuming even the brightest link in this
moon-drenched room. Communion’s possibility

perished in that wicker basket, and we hold close our
secrets, looped within circles, joined in these most hidden
stitches. Will you ever detach? I recall losing myself,

stepping from darkness into the white afternoon beyond the movie,
finding only strange faces on a street unraveling from
a wound I’d not yet felt. Now you pull apart the gatherings.

Yesterday’s scarf lies incomplete on the invisible shelf,
and tomorrow’s tightens uncomfortably around my throat,
even as I read aloud, proposing family life on a scale

we cannot duplicate, in a house lost long ago in a city
I’ve not yet seen, in a decade before my birth and a pearled
atmosphere of cleansing air into which my body longs to…