(inspired by Jessie Krebs’ Wilderness Survival MasterClass)
The survivalist would say a rope is the hammer and nails
of the survivor, Krebs says, and you can can imagine all the things
you can build with rope: shelves and baskets,
(and even buttons), a splint or a swing,
a bridge, an orientation for laying the signal tarp—
a chord between clauses and arguments, short little commas
that rope around phrases, dashes that bridge a gap,
the hugging embrace of a sentimental parenthetical,
all like a slender string endearing everything
on the long sidewalk of a sentence together—
mailboxes, fire hydrants, traffic lights, (and even two people),
without which that sentence would be in a free fall
of uncorded hookless rootless disarray and you would be left
to guess how it was all related what it all meant.