Node

Knots, lumps, aggregate clumps.
You’ve been thinking of those
Who love relationships

Among fellow humans,
Who find them endlessly
Interesting, who read

And write to probe their nodes,
To untangle the knots,
Diagnose the swelling

Lumps, dangerous or not,
To pick apart the clump,
To get to the center.

The center usually
Involves sex and gender,
And certainly hunger.

You wonder, are human
Relationships really
All that interesting?

The roles and the genders,
Maybe those are unique.
But isn’t it hunger

Generates them as well
As hunger generates
All living existence,

All the seething tangles
Of reproducing things?
And nodes form everywhere,

Any direction you look,
Any transect you carve
Of what burns on its own

As you understand it.
What’s uniquely human
To care about so much?

You think about this since
You live alone, famished,
In hungerless weather.