Knitting a Poem

*Purl three, slip metaphor with yarn in back,* repeat between *s

Photo by Oksana Zub on Unsplash

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A KNITTER LIKE ME                                                                  2025

“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care….” 
                                          – W. Shakespeare, Macbeth


I too, late in the night, have taken up
a raveled sleeve, switched on the lamp
so I can see to summon each strayed stitch,
regather and recount them, fill my needles  
with what will happen next. To knit a sleeve
is tedious, but tedium passes time
spent other-time in dreams; since here I am,
here in mid-night beneath the lamp, I might
as well be making, mending, tending, now a stitch
and then another, joining here in darkness
what cares and dreams the day has torn apart.

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UNKNITTING, EDITING                                                               2024


Stitch by stitch shifting slowly backwards, this needle-tip to that — 
words sharpen, a sentence disentangles and grows taut —
when a mistake is new, is easy still to fix,
lets you feel smart for having caught it.

An inch or more tugged free, each stitch to be caught up again —
chapters, stanzas, paragraphs erased, notes raw in the margins —
when it was shaping wrong, when you decide offhand
to add new colors or more texture, because you can.

Every stitch undone, the yarn reskeined, the needles bare —
a slash across the page, notebook slammed shut, the draft deleted — 
when your choices are, Start over or Start new.
Or, Not. Not is a choice. But not for long.

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I learned to knit in grade school, then put it down for decades. When I picked it up again twenty years ago, there was a nearly indescribable moment as I finished my first scarf, bound off the last row, and held it in my hands — no longer a project but a garment, a completed thing, a piece of cloth that I had made with yarn and sticks and my two hands. The nearest comparable sensation I’d had was the moment of finishing a poem.

“Look, I made a hat,” Sondheim’s George sings, “where there never was a hat!”¹ Knitters know that song. Poets know it, too. Most makers do, I’m guessing. The making keeps you up nights, sometimes; sometimes it tires you out so you can sleep. You make, and unmake, and make some more, and then, look at that — you’re holding a new thing in your hands, a thing that was never there before.

And, just that little bit, you’ve changed the world. I swear to God you have.

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1. Stephen Sondheim, “Finishing the Hat,” from Sunday In the Park With George.