we were laying on the floor talking
about your perpetually ***** hands,
stained from rusty machinery, and I got
to thinking that they looked an awful
lot like terra sigillata, or marmalade
or yams or tulip poplar honey--
waxy, with a glazed finish

you brush your left thumb down my pinky
and comment on the thinness of my skin
(unsurprisingly) I mean, look at my hands! you say
and I do and you're right, your hands
are like slabs of green wood--in fact
your whole body seems like some sort
of pliable tree trunk but I don't say this
because we've lapsed into a silence or
an otherwise conveniently synchronized
thought that has billowed up around our
hips until our arms are overlapped and
extended like a petiole of our bodies with
my palm cradled in yours like some aeriform body,
birdlike and gentle. You're tracing those lines like they
mean something.
Like they
mean something to you.

you have to understand that I am too often
inside myself, awash on a shore, grown into
the sand like a clam, experiencing solitude
through a shell, keeping at bay on the bay
sending prayers up like signal flares
pumped up into the sky, silent on
the horizon, loud from in here,
so when I tentatively thread my
fingers through your hair, know
that I do so in supreme intimacy
because words supposedly say
the most (depending on who
you're talking to) but my
hands are a different language
a different place, a different time
a company of dissarranged thoughts
and emotions, rippling and swelling
trying to make sense of being touched

so

softly