Hands

Supposedly universal, this initial fascination
     with all five fingers, the way they move in and out
     and grasp, and create sensations
along the inner surface of your mouth; I remember, too, how lovely
    they were when I first held them, those long fingers, immaculate and
    melancholy, as though sculpted from
    sighs exhaled in a dream.
You watch them move, unaware of all the things they will someday hold:
flowers, bubbles, silver coins, and one day, perhaps,
   some other fingers, some stronger than yours, some rougher;
some smaller, tiny and curled inward
as though hiding the key
to a forgotten garden

Yours

If one day, catching fire, the monotonous
sky, bitter and replete with
versions of something we call water,
should fall in, or spread outward
in giant clouds, or pour down
in an eruption of a thousand colors
I may not know the path across the desert
I may not know the way across the angry river

but I will find you
and we will walk together
your hand in mine, my hand in yours

Far Away

They say you are from far away
yet to me you seemed,
all along, so close
Even then, when I knew
only the exquisite flutter of each
of your minuscule fingers,
I imagined their lines and demarcations,
their intricate topography
as the map of a familiar country

Even then, when I pictured you
in those blurred fragments
they were glimpses
of an alien landscape

you were someone else
not in my image

Even now, as I hold you
and whisper
you are mine, you are mine
I think of that distant world
they say you come from
they say you belong to
 
I can only hope to meet you halfway

carry me with you
I am yours, I am yours

Listen

Sometimes in the cold wind there is a voice
stronger than a whisper but still, somehow, less palpable
than all the breathless noise
that echoes in the dark room
in the endless hours
between conversations.
Sometimes in the still night there is a sound
that makes us all seem less solitary
(if we listen)
not a word;
just, the tail-end of a dream
too close to forget
and too far away to touch

Talk

Talk about the moon, the little
lights you thought were stars until,
one by one, they disappeared
like forlorn candles. Talk about
politics, religion, other things
you are unsure of, books with middle parts
forgotten, cousins you have not heard from
since the wedding, since the funeral,
since a Thanksgiving so long ago
you can't remember who was there.
Talk, they say, even if you have nothing
to talk about, because she is watching,
in awe of everything
because she is there, waiting
to listen

Vast

Sometimes I come across a word I don't know:
storge, or galingale, or legerdemain
It isn't so surprising,
that in all the hundreds of thousands of words
I should encounter, from time to time,
the unfamiliar. 
More, that in the vast night
over the dark waves
we hear the flapping of a white sail
the timbre of a human voice
and find, always, somehow,
something to talk about

Star

Another long mile. You breathe;
the air is full of dust, the moon
achingly round.
All the words that once seemed important
are now gone, like the bitter
November leaves.
You yearn for the faraway light
of the nameless star
flickering in the dark sky,
both inviting
and devastatingly vast

Sleep

Sleep, now, in the midnight garden
under the shadeless winter trees
Sleep, now, to the whispered rhythm
of the frozen alabaster breeze
Sleep in the warmth of the amber fire
Sleep to the voice that drifts in from afar
Sleep, now, till the morning rises 
Sleep in the light of the silver star

The Imagined World

Sometimes you speak in a dream
And when I go to you
you cannot remember
what woke you:
a peculiar voice
a sound in the hall
or a burst of silver
in the darkness.
Sometimes I think you imagine
the world as it was before you
before us
a glimmer in the black sky
a distant memory
that returns each night
as you drift to sleep