Your hands

A wooden crate, a wheel, a handle make sounds of rainstorm
for a baroque theater in a Czech town, featured
on a morning travel special. How fascinating and far away,
and unstoppably displaced by other information. Ads
lean on the beauty, on orthopedic masterpiece,
on the unfathomable satisfaction through simple and unrelated means, and even
voice of critique and disbelief is claimed before you have the chance to think it.
The latest advertisements are self-aware, you see, and function on a meta level.
But trade is what we do.


Outside there's grass cutting through earth,
and tree heights competing for the sunlight,
angiosperms, delicate organs and fierce stems all on display,
their blood of substances that nourish, derange, kill and enlighten.
A well-established habit, a cup of coffee
is quenching overmedicated wonder. All falls into place,
your microscopic agony subsides, and caffeine fulfills you.
In the evening, it will be the properties of wine
and new inhabitants in castles of your eyes. The nebulae,
the supernovae, the radial arrangement of smooth muscle.
The windows to your immaterial yet highly guarded acres, fertile with self.
And overtaken for a moment by a grape, then wheat, then flesh.
You are a person to love behind all this, despite all this, because of this.
A distinguishable pattern embedded in the rock of everything,
endowed with agile perfection and miraculously, will.


The thicket of symbols is as dense as this summer air;
you can move your hands around, and drag logic along with humid Lorton.
Particulate, like pixels in a damaged video download —
cascading squares hopping about a strange attractor —
our thoughts grow circular. But kernel process, love, stays untouched.
Symbols cannot deform it, poems—relay it, customs—
confine it, chaos—degrade it, wishes—embalm it.
Your hand is warm, pulse and meat, and mitochondrial pre-history…
and feeling, intent gesture. Your hand is warm, care and breath, oxygen flow
with no syntactic sence, trickling throughout your body. It beats.
You are warm. The angles of your eyelids speak endearment. It is sweet to see.
Calm looks away… at those horizon edges
egging you on daily. We sigh at instances, two occurrences enmeshed into what happens.
Cosmic blinks, we take a second to unite and decompose,
we take an eon to make up our minds and come about into coherent form.
But like roots that have become their path, we're ours,
and nothing can undo us.


Some would declare the fact that I say "us" means something subconscious -
such scaffolding of theory; advice columns to market, medication sales.
Those substances that nourish and derange, enlighten and extinguish:
the very pigment of a feeling clasped in common sense and served, seasoned
with molecular derivatives, but mostly, simply words.
I wish they'd leave my words alone, the "us" alone,
us alone, uninterpreted, uninterrupted, unexplained,
amid the roots entangled and fungi in embrace, exchanging selves,
vines ascending upward, kudzu disseminating its engulfing being,
spider-veining urban growth and economic noise, and architecture
eroding into its stature as heritage, a symbiont with the graffiti caked into cement,
the bones, the real sounds of thunder, the ceremonial and the practical, delightful, blunt and nuanced,
waring, stripped of meaning, repackaged, reinvented and unearthed and left alone,
and under fog, risen out of stardust and doomed along with all,
your hands holding mine, offering me you.