This is that rare thing outside of Rhina's books, the perfect sonnet. And a sonnet that takes a dry matter of grammatical usage and turns it into an elegantly emotional (yet humorous) trope to illustrate something of the process of getting old, confronting mortality, etc., is rather miraculous. The poem's metaphor is more than just a convenient analogy but one that seems grounded in an article of faith that many readers of sonnets would subscribe to, i.e., that language itself embodies some of the philsophical underpinnings of human consciousness and awareness. This poem is at turns whimsical, humorous, clever, precise, poignant, insightful, and sad. It achieves many of these effects, I think, by being strictly true to its metaphor and working it out as a systematic, logical conceit rather than as a starting point for more abstract or disconnected reflections.
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Threaded Mode
