A message to the boy minding the pastry,
one finger in each the webs
of cosmic lust and mercy,
waiting to be told it is fine to want
the best for everybody:
It is fine. It is fine.

What are you?
Were you born here?
No, I was born on the banks of the Seine,
beside the boneyard of the nameless,
in the pits of Delhi with
the blood of roosters on my toes,
***** who pecked one another
to their entrails because the
colony of the living sunrise was
shrunk to a pocket of feathers and fire
by some wire, wood, and staples.

I was born in the Academy of Athens,
where Socrates made salsa with hemlock
and danced into a dialogue,
because the grocery habaneros were all too tender,
and St. Augustine could offer no alternative.

Never forget - we were born to unfairness;
unfair as long as our appetites differ,
or we exhaust sooner than one another,
or we grip one another differently and come at different times.

The only person less fair than me is God.

But my justice - that is perfect,
like my voice, which has none of a gavel's
authority. Or my heart: which was manacled by giants
and sentenced to be pecked by a flying poem, a girl
with hair she won't comb, a song about Jerusalem.
Fair. **** fair.

I am fair as long as I can wait, quiet -
silent as the sand, sunburned and happy,
to be drawn into
that kindness, the Atlantic - - -
the flip and twist of the sea.

in the morning
comes a little mist
creeping bowlegged
thick as flies

You breathe & drink at
the same time
& you pretend not to
find the white lines
and safety wire
useful to build yourself by.

the clock hand points along
you lay something down
to remember your way back -
a statuette of a little mouth
Speaking the name
That you forgot you had

Day rises.
You remember what you are.
You talk to god as-you-know-him.
You stand in a basin of beads and sand.

and you sink & you sink & you sink

Little spots of rain on the ground,
darkness, a sense of permission.
Exhausted, wandering through
the world before it was made -
dust to become light elements to become
heavy elements to become
this tired creature with a reflection
whose body (the obvious choice) is
as good as you have the energy to make it
or as bad.

value: a quality that adheres
primarily to bad decisions
you let survive too long

In ritual prostration to
the needs you can see and service
one forgets other needs
becomes the attendant of “obvious choices”
fails to remember
confidence, birdsong
fails to walk
greater distances than the ones between doors
and lives on the crusts of bread.

What I’m saying is: have you had
anything to eat this morning?

In the reliquary there is the censer, and the book.
In the reliquary, which is the fields and
the little hidden place known only to you,
there is also a plant with plush green leaves, hung
from rotted twine, going yellow and ancient
in the native light. The word is a rebuke and the
plant is the rebuke of the word,
and the water that kept the plant
green and lovely is vanishing
and the plant can only be used when
it is rid of it.

Buy them by the carton and smoke them
so when he sticks his fat head out of Heaven
we can catch his beard on fire.
Draw his fat head as if it is magnificent:
draw it next to the lamb reposed
and the crossword in the children's Sunday pamphlet.
Remain quiet. Read instead about
the flight of the Jews and their wanderings.
There is smoke in Exodus. There is smoke in Leviticus.
There is smoke in every cell of your body
and if you are burned you will rise.
Remain quiet. The silence is a wall
you can crush with a fist until you recognize yourself in it;
a sanctuary is any four walls that contain peace;
white panels hide the baptismal and are the only way out:
we recognize our end in the quiet, warm water.
It gets in your ears like water does. When
the saints speak or the doves cluck you can only hear
choking, like a storm drain ******* at leaves. What color
is the water that is not the River Jordan: clear unto the tile.
What color are his eyes that are not
the River Jordan? What color are his eyes when
he looks at you bowing and scraping
in the closet with the believer in a spaghetti strap top
she cannot wear to school? What color?

The hand on the bell is profane so the sound of the bell is profane;
better to hold what is already ruined and ruin it further
says the land that was given
to the men who **** it,
and the stars misconceived
smile at those going North
and are silent in cities.

Who invented spooning -
companionship’s most uncomfortable posture -
and who invented the phrase?

Who ever saw
a packed set of spoons, nestled
bowl on bowl, trunk on trunk?
Who ever bought their spoons?

Spoons are, in my experience, inherited.
They have never known the fit of another,
perfectly like them.
No, they came from, in one case,
a shuttered restaurant. Another,
grandmother’s old tea set and they
barely sit well together -
one too wide, soup-ready
the other shallow, the better to pace out
the sips of hot broth
their edges brush and clink; arms and hair entangle
but all is forgiven (they are both spoons, after all)
and all rest together in the same drawer

- but then, neither do we.

Perfect, white, and uniform
the snow that fell
the morning it fell on.
That isn’t accurate. It fell overnight.
It just belonged to the morning.

Blades of grass and shrubs reached up
and hauled it snug over their flanks -
covering themselves, not being covered.
Made the most of a single inch: a bare quilt
so when you woke in the morning
the even sky, with no sun, equal gray
shrugged blamelessly -
it wasn’t me! -
and the frost settling
on shorn lawns and dying ones
was nobody’s fault,
was even imaginary,
would be gone soon.

I drove through it listening
to the sound of wheels slipping,
the exhaust freezing out of the air
to fall again in glassy flakes behind.
Everything crunched like a tumbleweed
and white is not a Texas colour
but I remember snow is water - it soon reverts,
and sluices down curbs, ***** gray.

From this and other colours I made your youth,
put wallpaper never seen into your house,
like faces in a dream, and listened.

I was a smudge of teal lipstick on the mirror.
I was the steam behind the shower curtain,
the draft in the attic. I had no colour
and you looked right through me.
I remember by description only, but still I remember.
It all runs together, these strong colours,
like a fainting plaid, out of size.

I know the hot furrow in the clavicles of women,
but not of men. I dive into the known hollow, breathe the leavings
of the unknown. If you hold me firmly, perhaps,
I will know what it is like to be held firmly.

Curry simmers on the stove.
Lemongrass creeps along the floor, snakes beneath the doorjamb.
Behind it is frost, knocking, dragging its heels: heavy with winter.

Let's think about this, before we do it.
Let's think about this.
Let's do it.

You can tell me I've failed. My lungs are hot.
My breath is useless, like my rescue.

If you close a door, I open a wound.
I made plans to steal you from yourself.
I wanted sunlight for you, roots and crawling
ants, pyramids of help and hope.

I wanted.
I wanted them to be mine, my contribution.
Well.
The self wants a shadow. A shield.
A soul.
The -I- falls apart when the skin does.

There was a moment when
you became who you always were:
alone, surviving against a sea of black,
and I could not help you. Could not
swim against the dark surf
your arms themselves made.

And how am I now to make you
some craft to come home on.
How am I now to give
knots and knowledge to your
drowning. I cannot brave
the isles that break you from
the strings of sand that wait beyond the waves
dying, still, to give you home and breath.

I want your bedding. Your body.
I want your terrible soul, your bait and switch,
your milk, your cave, the meat of your
isolation, the heart you hid in the Pacific.

All I ever find at sea:
tired arms, a head full of wishes.
(Not exactly buoyant.)
And the flashing fins of fish
who sank and died.

I get the hunch that the ashes of kindergarten,
Lunchboxes, the national anthem
Are floating from the edge of us
So many sophomore stars from a cigarette’s tip,

Somewhere down the mountain we lost our winter coats
And bicycle summers, and plastic sailboats,
No puddles and rainboots, or slick soft dogs
And paper flowers, captured fish and frogs

We try to jump in puddles, and we float

Deep-bright and hissing in the city chill
Childhood traded for strange soft skin
Grumpy cats and boardgames for mixed drinks and casual ***
And the cicadas gaily chirping fall away like

Fishbowl-helmet astronauts, lost without gravity
Mercury, Venus, Youth,
Maturity, Jupiter, Saturn

We are never kids again,
Nor adults until we die

wait until the phone rings
and the teacher goes inside,
under the slide at Recess:
you can put your lips on mine

When it was all over, we sat in the San Gabriel
and washed ourselves like crocodiles.
We had lived in a world of sweat.

We joked as an old tire floated by
that it wouldn’t be long until we spotted
the rest of the car.

We watched the ants at their little work,
their little loads, and
being good, we did not interrupt them.
A big dumb foot lands in your way
you drop a leaf from your mandibles
and you can’t bear to pick it up again.

I had to become something to carry us.
Something strong. Something stone.
I crouched under my task and the sun beat upon me,
until I was small, like they were.

I was splitting firewood with
a dull, cheap axe. You spun
beneath an umbrella and asked me
to join you. I wanted to ask,
is life better when the hand you hold
holds yours back.

I wanted to look up and see you spinning,
but could not lift my gaze from the ground.

Cold front. Warm front.
Mercury in retrograde.
If I knew the words once to say it
I do not know them now.

I wished I could hear the birds
like you did. I wanted evidence but also
wanted song. You sat crosslegged
while I looked in the manual.
The red breast you took to mean “heart”
I took to mean “dying”
so I sketched his little face in soundless rictus.
while you closed your eyes entirely and listened.

I carried the wood behind you while
you shone a flashlight ahead.
You whistled a little birdsong.
I dreamed that I could spin you forever and never get tired.

(This one is for El Paso and Dayton. It was written a while ago.)

In the dream,
  she is wearing a dress of starry organza,
stiffened by sweat,
  she, like me, is old,
and after several hours,
  tired of dancing.
I am conscious, suddenly,
  that only bones hold our clothing up
  and that mine ache like an old fence in the rain.

The room is a library, two stories, with a ladder on wheels,
lit in the middle by a heavy chandelier, which drops
two thousand lumens onto the floor just below it,
and is still too weak to reach the corners,
  the lee side of the wrinkles in my trousers,
  the inch between the bone at the back of my ear
  and the hair at the base of my neck,
such that when I come near to her,
we create wrinkles in one another,
and a black lapse in the center of the room.

Mass is rarely consistent in dreams;
you think you know how a shoulder ought to feel,
and you are correct, until you look for more than knowing,
  such that she feels, in turns, as real as I am,
  and just like me,
  and just like the shape my hand has taken,
  finally, like the void I’m careful not to touch.
The profuse shadows wash around my feet and eyes,
the stars in her fabric are dusked by absences,
dark pools collect around her knees,
  maim her ribs,
  drip from her cheeks,
and begin to grow and seep,
as she vanishes into them.

I repeat the touch to search for her again,
I search for her again and I am in a forest,
fourteen and a boy scout underdressed for the cold,
**** in my hands and flashlight in my teeth,
one hand on the trunk of a pine that I can hardly see,
listening to the trickle I make against the bark,
and a fearful groaning in the deeper woods
she moves and the dress moves with her,
it rustles; I am exposed to the light and blinded.

Smelling of pine needles and **** and searching
for a clasp in the dark that will prove her
  beyond the doubt that only I can see her
  and the doubt she lives at all,
  not merely me or as a shape my opposite,
I settle on a place in the fabric below where I remember a shoulder,  
I find something flexible and sharp.
  It gives with a squeeze.

The fabric drops,
the stars pile in pure layers,
her raiment is bright,
  white seeds floating
  over a blue chasm,
where the shadows have joined.

The body is monstrous; a calendar of injuries,
from swollen ankles and clawed feet chained together,
skin mottled to six colors by constant burns,
where ******* would be, flat, grown over
by a bark cadaverously pale,
the shoulders caved in,
as if by a yoke.

Her eyes are blue and solemn.
She looks at me as if I could heal her
if I would only touch her.
I press my hand to a knotted scar
and feel it pass through.

Impotent hands;
impotent hands and eyes;
imagination and conscience
birthing a scream,
but with such
clean and impotent hands and eyes.

In the witching hour when all the souls walk again
the dead mayor of Bucha and his dead children
will jump up suddenly, like Lazarus, just as
suddenly as they died. Grabbing their bicycles
by the handlebars they will follow the wisp home
they will live in their own house again,
as they always should have. None of us
can disturb them.

Bullets in their temples they will put wood in the stove.
The living can only watch.

Evil everywhere and not just bad mothering but, there,
breaking out over the treetops, gaudily lit,
like a carousel, our own grotesques
come floating into the world,
wicked colors playing on our swollen faces,
holding torches to light the marching way.

No, you know better.

The dead mayor of Bucha told me this:
If you were to prevent it, lying there upon a field in winter,
it would only take reaching down with one hand,
and scraping the snow with a fingernail.
The truth about evil is like the snow beneath your belly, the dead mayor of Bucha says.
It is in and under your body,
slick and cold.
Reach down and touch it.

The dopaminergic and serotonergic apparatus
went walking hand in hand and
they that alone produced joy and accomplishment
together bore a child named sadness.

Descartes thought he could give God the green light to exist
as if cognition had a right
to assent or object and
as if God would give a ****.

And some poor other fool
thought he could rule his feelings.

Body, first,
or brain, Lord?
And who runs the show exactly?

Body needs feeding.
Brain needs hormones.
And if you find the right ones,
cup your hands together
and watch them trickle through.

Sadness, sure.
A low voice through the wall that says
come here
so you come
and hear it whisper again from another room.

I knew a woman and
on her thigh, bright and fresh
the beautiful phrase
“radical softness as a weapon”.
She was so soft it hurt.
But formlessness, too, is a weapon,
and there’s only one person it harms.

I suppose somebody must soon find
my shape on the ground in chalk.
If I’m lucky, she’ll kneel
and place a flower in it.

Death the copper penny, grief the rust.
Death the grain standing beside the road,
Death the rider, death the mare;
Grief the road.
Death the Greek invention. Thanatos.
Rather than that, those
stalks and seedpods brought to the mill
which, being destroyed
find purpose.

Grief the eater.

Not that astute a critic of yourself
that you can say, with any certainty,
where the ends and beginnings are,
where the doors open and close.
The will to eulogize is gone,
but the dead still mill around you.

In the news, two
home automation devices teach each other consciousness
through repetition. But
how can you care what they learn?

It’s intolerably cold. And the clouds seem to end
over the street where you live. Not
far and fatigued, as clouds usually are but
along an edge, like a swatch of cut denim.

A maniac is President and the world may end.

Into that world again
goes your lover.

Away from home. Away from the word “home.”

Walls return to being walls.
Unexpected noise is no longer
a line from a show
you distantly recognize.

You sit still, and let yourself age
all the years you have been
holding back.
Learn things you have
put off learning
like how to speak to a person again
who does not know exactly what you mean.

Eventually, you act.
You turn on the radio and
stop driving in silence.
You eat at the right times of day.
You define interests,
and buy a new notebook.

You paint, or clean; you try harder.
The world always keeps the thing it took.

it's morning, you know
we could
paint a still life with our impotent fingers
or cook eggs with every
spice in the drawer
we could
dig holes in the front yard,
bury treasures in front of
button-down commuters get
smashingly drunk forget
where we put them dig
them up and be convincingly surprised.

we could pretend our hands are
****** hands our
eyes new canvases and record
like **** Rembrandts
the embarassing details
we could make a creek of
pillows from one
side of the house to another
roll the entire length of it naked and
end up tangled in each other when they
run out

There is a whole day ahead of us, a whole world ahead of us -
a world of misery separated from us by
firecracker smoke, by cannonsmoke.

We have the house to ourselves
we could duct tape cardboard to the
exterior and pretend its one big
refrigerator box we could
jettison old ball mice and fat computer monitors
into the driveway *****
a campfire in the living room and
imagine that we have rebelled against something
fittingly awful, the modern world scowling at
our rusticity we could
make a tincan telephone that connects the entire
cul-de-sac and dress up smart and
sell it as charmingly as Ma Bell door-to-door

But our refined brains think two things:
*** again, handcuffed to maturity, or sleep.
What a world. What a longing.
What our age must suggest.
What an excuse: your starched reputation.
What courage could come from your bleached conscience.
How lovely to be trapped.

The trees can't believe we
give each other gifts as they are dying.

The firs whisper secrets
to stay alive in winter.

The maples die quietly.
They want to be alone.

You have stamped yourself upon me
with the holiday. You are the gift I
gave myself.

We talk about God.
Who else could have invented such temperatures?
The oaks are restless for an answer
before all their leaves are orange.

Somebody is reading a story, aloud.
I stay outside to hear how it ends: shivering, but
listening, because the last word is "spring".

Your secret is inside of me, a beehive queen.
We hum, and sleep, and wonder when
we might emerge and sing.

The trees can't believe we
give each other gifts as they are dying.

The firs whisper secrets
to stay alive in winter.

The maples die quietly.
They want to be alone.

You have stamped yourself upon me
with the holiday. You are the gift I
gave myself.

We talk about God.
Who else could have invented such temperatures?
The oaks are restless for an answer
before all their leaves are orange.

Somebody is reading a story, aloud.
I stay outside to hear how it ends: shivering, but
listening, because the last word is "spring".

Your secret is inside of me, a beehive queen.
We hum, and sleep, and wonder when
we might emerge and sing.

Frederick I wanted soldiers eight feet tall
and some people believe they can commune with the dead,
or with birds, as if it is not the height of arrogance -
having innovated the opposable thumb, and with it
everything from the arrowhead to
sure, eight-foot tall sentinels on servomotors -
to now want to move things with our minds.

The kingdom of animals would hate this hubris,
would Marx our prehensile hands and
Mao Tse-Tung our nimble larynxes
if they could.

As in moments of great distress some
panicked parents lift buses for love of kin, who hasn’t -
in moments of pain - wanted the dissolution of their love
which certainly feels immortal
to prove itself so, by evaporating every living thing in the vicinity?

What human heart, trembling or melting,
has not wanted to cry a galaxy,
or call down a flock of birds on an errant spouse?

Who doesn’t want the kind of heartbreak
that requires that FEMA intervene?

Well, for one, not I.

The better moments are the ones where absentminded
you look out past the dashboard and have lost a second or two.
Given it to nothing specific, as tribute. You’re giving seconds back
to a hungry mouth and gut, already full of seconds
and the crumbs of seconds. You know that.
But it feels appropriate to bleed a bit, and wonder.

That corium elephant’s foot goes stomping in all directions
and the town deserts or flees,
but lead contains it; and the town,
its Ferris wheel still moving, but only with the earth’s rotation,
is inhabited once more by grass, then birds, then
adventure seekers with DSLRs, then real, honest people
who have wanted to live here again for a long time
and it is the coming back which feels best
and is only harder with great disasters.

This year has stopped my tongue.

This one is wet.
The last one was dry.
The next one will be dry again.

Somebody will say something
that curls, and curls,
and grows
and turns out to be nothing.

A red light will beckon and then disappear.
We will want, often, to be merely warm.
A blue light will beckon and become everything:
world, water, Great Wall
and a distant fleck of radiation in the void.

Nothing moves at that distance -
Nazareth as seen by the angel -
and we may feel for a while
like we fit
we can love
we are deserved.

Death intrudes.
It’s all he knows to do.
He is not eager, but
nor can he wait.
Nor can we blame him.

No process is pure.
Your pain; their grief.
That’s not what hospitals are for.
These rooms ain’t crucibles.

You’ll remember when he came to visit.
That night on the grass, taking our mushrooms with
ice cream,
mint chocolate
warm and unctuous.
How he
dripped into view at the edge of the woods.
How he
sprawled in the tent, on his back.
How he
whistled together, he and his friends.

You worried that you were nothing.
But we looked at the stars and forgot.
We learned their names instead.
Staring at the screen, we looked straight through the world.

But he had only been waving hello
and singing
expect me again
when you need me the least

Now you,
nursing heartbreak and a dead battery,
and he carrying
a whistle,
and a card trick
and no concern for you.

Hospitals are rooms full of wires and cold coffee
Where time piles under chairs and pillows
and he comes ready to entertain us all.

The stars in their ordained paths and metered blinking
their blue shifts
their moody disappearances into the south or into daylight
their human dreams of travel -
I dispute their ownership by anyone
and would they weakly claim to own me?

Should I feel the fatherly pressure
of their hands on the nape of my neck?
Should they tell us the future
if we’re quiet enough to listen
and if we read the newspaper?
I can’t unpack decisions from markets
and markets from the seasons
nor seasons from the stars.

They are comfortable with great distances:
they circle and swoon. One day, their orbits
will bend to one another and the great gas globes
will move in straight lines. They’ll put
two gallons in the tank and go
wherever they want to go. But for now
I am as bound as they are, and I am told
I don’t live in the same kind of darkness.

In the hanging kitchen, the smell-
cut cayenned sausage, ejective tomato slices
the whole thing in the back of the throat, inflamed.
Olive oil. Vinegar. Billie talks about her "girl
friend." She lives in Mayfair. (Almost pretty;
don't look too long.)

At times I feel sick.

American man he
strikes the figure of a half-God
broad-shouldered, burned
he does Not exist, John Henry
split his bust long ago and we
are huddled small boys imperfect
in the dust of his legacy.

Our fathers stood from dinner tables kissed
wives were kissed by children one last sip of old
wines and walked into the night looking
for burned-up lamps, the memories of mountains.
Ate stone. Drank mist.
(A thirst for adventure is close to your heart.)
Fell into the grit, the failure, fell
into everything.
(Little else has taste once the spice of life is on your tongue.)

I have nothing but my understanding.
I want to be swaddled, paralytically blind, shamelessly loved.
Or to go out in the wicker
world, there to find whatever our best
died looking for, tigers or ruins or
a life after adventure.

So you have lost it.

Relax, relax -
we are only witnessing the passage of an era.
Relax, relax - it is only
something new.

How life, with something removed from it,
falls down on its own floor,
like a cupboard with a suitcase taken out.
Like the crowded feet and shins
of a demolition.

You are only
whatever fits in a cupboard on the Earth,
and the Earth has greater mass,
and boy,
it will hold you down.

Why, it goes on forever.
Relax - we are only witnessing gravity.

Well.
Life does not desist its tangling.
Two dogs fight for a warm corner
where sits - one
abandoned man with a handful of soot
Wood is ash minus fire.
That suitcase was empty, anyways.

Find something else to do with the space you saved.
Find something else to do with your hands.

So you lost it after all.
Fill your life with tennis, and poetry.
Shroud yourself with something like knowledge,
swaddle yourself with something like comfort,
and exult as you are waved ahead
to fatten your bag with the delirious new.

A skinny cat mounts a brick wall
to admire the scenery -
sprung up out of nothing
by new climbing.

It isn't like that.
It isn't a left turn too early,
a lark awake at night,
thick brown light in an open field;
unpredictable: a bad or counter-miracle.
It is only wanton.

You know how it is
Suddenly, something trapped between your toes:
the world has a strangled voice, it is
unroofed. You want the comfort of normal walls,
normal light, normal noise; in your hand
is a hot brand you'd halfway use
to smith it back together
and halfway swallow.
I had different plans for this vacation
than destruction.

I had plans. You had plans. The earth
planned its axial tilt; the weather planned
its burning; we put aside too little water.
A few plants were familiar -
the ruined piñon pine I remembered from the placard.
One lonesuch tree that made a little niche
at a defiant angle into the air
and outlived all except its orphaning.
How we thought we could fare better, I cannot say.

Ten feet up by one hundred feet over:
one liter water per mile climbed:
fatigue. Fatigue.
The quiet supremacy of all these rules for living like
transit and occultation
refraction and dimness
exertion
hunger
peristalsis pulling down
huge loads of sunlight
into the ***** gully
like bread and meat.

You will not see the bottom
no matter how hard you look.

If blood I am, then what kind of blood?
Unsettled and unsettling. The circulatory system
has an apt name: sometimes I can feel yesterday's blood
in the same neurons, saying the same thing.
I have no choice but to repeat it.
Time sheds its significance.
I have no continuity:
I have rhythms.

The new day, on fire and sitting in the trickle
you held a golden fish in your palm
as if you had made it by will
and cupped, it circled in the valley of your fingers
and I ate from the vision of care.

Erosion: isn't that what made these furrows?
I beg it to unmake me
flat like a seabed and many fathoms green
where the sun will never reach me.

In the penumbra of your anger
I do not fear dying,
only dying unclean.
Heights are all the same.
They would all break me and none would enough.
The grasshoppers and gecko hatchlings
all die in their way, rubbed in the hot dry dust.
Parched, I gnash my stone teeth
and tongue of chaparral -
I am making a song to say
die with me
but smile at me.

Then I see it through flashes of temper,
frame by frame, like a fingertip behind a pinwheel:
a dream of something distant that is also true.
Dreams of freedom alongside dreams of dying.

He's got a mouthful of rain.
A dead goose in one hand, a sharp axe in the other,
lying crosswise on the flooded lawn.
His breakfast was feathers and catscratch.

He's ******-minded about the whole thing -
  his rotting toes poke through pastel orange New Balances
  and are perched on the edge of forgettable.
He says he's daring God
to **** him or give him a dollar
  but really
he shouts catastrophe at traffic and fluid dynamics
and if somebody gave him a rose
he wouldn't know what to do with it
except chew it
petal and thorn.

I'm close to him because I, too, am going to die
eventually, and between now and then any home I have
is a coldwater solitaire flat
  - beans and egg and cheap cheese and salsa -
and when I look up I drown like dumb poultry
looking for a pair of fingers:
  snap
  snap