His hands remind her of bird nests under a sky which peels back clouds stretched six months wide; it is known that the black, blue, gray layered as slip to skirt, can be dissected. Lines of a hand which could be all that ever was in a life, etched touchings and traces from head to heart to skin. The fabric of a mind on tip of thumb, the aged and hardened work roughened bark of fingers which feel like the beach after the world has been worn into sand. The sand of a soul, time breaking against form. And here is the person, not in eyes, not in mouth, but in a hand: what have you done with your life? What have you made, what love have you given, who have you held through the night? The hands are the leavings and the comings, the spirit splintered against itself. The hands are human despite our best efforts to carve something more into being, being carves itself upon us. The taste of your life, the hardship of your winters, I love the snow on your eyes but more so the melting ice of your hands and how they move so humanly, how they melt with time and harden upon my body. How I know I am alive when I feel them on my skin. I could write poetry about each individual finger and I believe I should. Life is so fleeting but the details of your living will not go unnoticed, will not be lost in the oceans of becoming: here is your rootedness, your tree as cavern and caved tastes, dreams under callous paw and loved lines of sentient forms which have known you and hearts which wear your print and what you have carved into being with the skin of your mind. I could write in another language each fiber of the nail which you clip. Hands, extended beyond the shirt where the cloth ends and vulnerable skin protrudes, hardened then softened by a life well lived. Fearless lives lead to fearless hands and there is dancing between the finger tips.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 20:50:12 +0000