The speaker looks back at a small moment from early childhood: a line of pre-schoolers holding a thick rope, shuffling across a college campus together. The image of a centipede makes the children seem like one creature with many legs, moving in careful order. What strikes the speaker is how much has vanished. They can't remember where the group was going, and they've since learned and lost whole languages. Yet one physical feeling remains: being a single point in a moving chain, what the poem calls a "node on a travelling rhizome."
The ending is the most striking part. The speaker compares the memory of the knot to the last sound of a forbidden word that the tongue almost tastes. That makes the memory feel bodily, half-secret, and just out of reach, yet still vivid. The mood is quiet and reflective, with a gentle wonder that the thing we keep may be a sensation of belonging rather than a story.