both nature and daily living and are highly visual but also auditory, for readers tend to hear the rain as well as see it and perhaps even recall the feel of it on their own skin.

The speaker further remembers how his mother's hands are “a wet eagle's / two black-pink crinkled feet.” This is an extremely vivid image drawn from nature that describes the her withered, apparently crippled hands. Like an eagle with one talon hurt in a mouse trap, the speaker's mother also has one useless finger.

The speaker even suggests the sense of taste when he recalls his “cold parchment tongue” licking tree bark as he watches her mother pick up a single grain of rice from the floor. These images emphasize the family's poverty. Every grain of rice counts, and every possible food source is used.

As for punctuation, the poet's notations are standard and correct. He does, however, use plenty of enjambment; he runs his sentences across poetic lines to increase the sense of smooth flow throughout the poem. The images blend together, one into another, as the poet extends phrases and sentences over normal poetic boundaries (like line and stanza breaks) instead of choosing to use a stop (often a period or a comma) at the end of lines and stanzas.

In the opening stanza of the poem the speaker draws similarities between his mother and a "twisted backbone tree." The tree serves as a metaphor for the mother. The fact that the tree has a "twisted backbone" suggests that the speaker's mother is perhaps old, and physically in pain. The buds of "whitepetal" flowers on the tree remind the speaker of his mother's youth. The implication is that his mother, when she was young, was beautiful like the flowers, and also pure and unblemished by age, as connoted by the color white.

In the second stanza, the speaker compares his mother's hands to "a wet eagle's / two black-pink crinkled feet." The word "crinkled" here again suggests that the speaker's mother is now old. The fact that she is compared to a majestic predator bird like an eagle also suggests that, despite being old, she is still powerful. The naturalistic imagery used to describe the speaker's mother suggests that she, like the tree and the eagle, is perhaps a force of nature. She is majestic and powerful.

The punctuation in the poem is rather sparse. In the first stanza, for example, there is no mid-line punctuation at all. This is true also for the third stanza and most of the second stanza. The effect of this sparse punctuation is to make the images in the lines run together and overlap, making it difficult for the reader, upon an initial reading, to separate those images. In the second stanza, for example, the image of the mother's hands runs into the image of the eagle's talons. Perhaps the poet deliberately avoids punctuating between images like these to better suggest a convergence of the images. The mother's hands, in this instance, seem the same as, and indistinguishable from, the eagle's talons.

The images in this poem (quoted above) are based upon contradictions. The first, "upon this twisted / blackbone tree the silk and white / petal of my mother's youth," dramatizes the contradiction between a twisted black tree and the white of youthful skin. The two contrasting images are so deftly woven together that the petals of the black tree represent the "silk and white" of a mother's youth. Thus at one and the same time, nature symbolizes the "twisted" spent youth of a warn out mother and her past energized, soft youth of "silk and white petal[s)."

A similar contradictory contrast occurs in the next image where her beautiful diamond earrings spray forth sewing needles, one of the tools of a mother's trade. Later, her hands and feet are compared to an eagle's talons in another contrasting contradiction. Her eagle's feet-hands are wet--another tool of a mother's trade: wash water--and her pink feet are crippled talons, crippled from an accident with a garden mouse trap.

Another comment about the imagery is that, in the midst of the improbable comparisons, true events are told: running in from the rain to the sound of crying babies ("crying cradles"); a foot caught in a garden mouse trap; a withered figure that was a "onetime wing" of prowess and beauty. The punctuation is critical for understanding these improbable, contrasting, contradictory comparisons that comprise the imagery because, by themselves, they defy logic and need signposts pointing to logical comprehension. The punctuation provides these signposts. The simple punctuation of period (end stop) and comma tell where each logical unit of imagery begins and ends. For instance, consider the punctuation in this passage:

    From her ear-rings three diamonds
    splash a handful of needles,    5
    and I see my mother run back
    from rain to the crying cradles
    The rains tack and sew
    with broken thread the rags          
    of the tree-tasselled light.    10

Despite the irregular capitalization, we know that all the lines form a logical whole because of the punctuation. We know that the "handful of needles" splashing from the diamond earrings is logically connected to "The rains tack and sew" because the comma indicates the continuation of a thought. The absence of further punctuation shows that it is the "rags" that she sews in light speckled by the shadow of trees:

    The rains tack and sew
    with broken thread the rags          
    of the tree-tasselled light.    10