My Mother's Knitting

I came up with this poem yesterday while walking back from school. I really like it; hope you do too!

My Mother’s Knitting

While my mother speaks, she knits with her needles

the blanket she began beside her mother, white yarn diving

beneath the pattern, then leaping at every breath.

Like water trails behind a boat, or clouds behind a speeding

jet, her nimble fingers leave traces of a memorized design hiding

within the synaptic wrinkles of her mind. I believe her past

is a black fly wrapped in spider’s silk, full of sweet

juices she’s laid aside to feed me. Between her bed

and the couch where she curls (where I kneel, listening

to her stories) there is a loose line connecting the moments,

as if drawing a dangled string: Ariadne’s trick to remember

the twists in the Labyrinth and the safe path back.

I’ve seen the same style line after scuttling leaves and people,

up and down daily sidewalks, past the zigzag of grocers,

coffee-shops, and  inviting neighbors. They entrust their shadow

to the earth. They weave in the sunlight. They brush a pathway

by their impressionist strokes. Photographers capture

this lace effect through long exposures of night’s highways:

the vehicles are vanished. Only remain the red lines of taillights pursuing

the tug of headlights. The unseen spinning wheels churn on,

beyond the picture limits, across the roads of nations.

Cartographers could mark on maps the fibers of every trip

(the walkers, cars, sails, and airplanes) to make the world look

like the sinew of a heart, organic, alive, and flexing

when my mother breathes. There is no way to finish

the woven blanket. She is planning to pass it on. Everything

connects, she says through the cord of her cotton voice.

While my mother speaks, my ears are pricked with the point

of her conversation. The thread is led through my canals, down

to the anvil’s slate, where the hammer forges imagination.

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Maybe it's just my craziness, but sometimes I can imagine the interconnectedness of everything - as if every moving thing left a shadow of itself behind. I'm hoping in this poem that most people have see a long exposure of a photograph of a busy road at night, because that imagine explains best the concept I am trying to explain in this poem. And, of course, other than the imagery of this poem and the imagination, I am also just talking about the metaphorical interconnectedness of things - of people, of generation, of ideas. So yeah, I really really like this poem because I understand it. The question is, do you like it? Did it make any sense before you read my explanation? Hope you enjoyed it in the end!