Dave Bonta's "Connection" is about what survives when nearly everything else has been lost. As a pre-school child, the speaker held a knotted rope with a line of other children and walked across a college campus. He cannot remember where they went, or why. What he remembers is a feeling: of being one link in a moving chain. The poem's central idea is that this bodily sense of belonging has outlasted facts, destinations and even the "whole languages" he has since learned and forgotten. Identity, it suggests, begins less as a private possession than as a place in a connected line.
The poem is built from two sentences. The first is short and concrete: "Pre-school, we clung to knots / in a long, thick rope / & made our way across the college campus, / orderly as a centipede." The second, which runs from "Of our routes" to "that fibrous knot," is long, hesitant and full of qualifications. The shift matches the move from a simple scene to the effort of remembering it. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines vary in length, so the poem sounds like someone thinking aloud. Enjambment does a lot of the work. "Of our routes or destinations I recall / nothing" drops the word "nothing" onto a new line, so the forgetting is enacted in the line break. "But" is stranded at the end of a line, a small hinge before the memory that did survive.
The imagery is carefully chosen. The centipede simile is funny, since the children become a creature made of many small legs, but it also shows how individuality dissolves into the group. "Orderly" sounds like an adult's word, perhaps a teacher's ideal, applied to a line of toddlers. Then comes the botanical vocabulary. A rhizome is a stem that spreads sideways and sends up new growth, and a node is a point on a stem where growth begins. Both words also belong to the language of networks, which makes the title "Connection" work in two ways: the literal rope and the idea of the self as a junction. Calling the rhizome "travelling" is a nice touch. It turns a plant, which we think of as fixed, into something that walks across a campus. The word "fibrous" links rope fibre to plant fibre, so the rope and the rhizome become one image.
The sounds help hold this together. The hard c and k sounds of "clung," "college," "campus" and "centipede" give the opening a bumpy, clustered feel. "Knots," "node" and "nothing" echo each other with their n sounds, so the thing remembered and the thing forgotten are tied together by sound.
The final simile is the poem's most daring move. The knot is felt "like the final consonant of some forbidden word / the tongue can almost taste." The memory has shifted from touch to taste and from hands to mouth. It is also tied to language, which fits the earlier mention of learned and forgotten tongues. The comparison suggests a memory from before words, one that the speaker can feel but cannot fully say, like a word on the tip of the tongue. Why the word is "forbidden" is left open. Judging by the imagery, it may be because the memory belongs to a stage of life that adult language cannot fully reach.
The structure also rewards a second reading. The poem begins with "knots" in the plural, shared by the whole line of children, and ends on a single "knot." The group has narrowed down to one point held in one person's memory. And the last word, "knot," itself ends in a final consonant, the sharp stop of the t, so the poem finishes on the very thing it has just described. The sentence that has been stretching and delaying its object finally pulls tight.
What makes the poem significant is how much it gets from so little. It does not claim a grand moment. It chooses a small, slightly absurd image of children on a rope and finds in it a model of how a self is formed, not as an isolated mind but as a node that others pass through and hold onto. The irony is gentle but real. The speaker has gone on to a life of study, picking up and losing whole languages, and what stays is a rough bit of fibre in the hand. The poem leaves us wondering which of our own memories have lasted in the same way.