Maps and Fingertips

J.A.P.

1.
I have an object at my side,
and it is impressing indentations
along the palm wrinkles of my hand.
Who might call attention to this
kinship? But me. I want
to be reborn. To be volatile. And here
is a flick of the wrist. There, the hand.

2.
Sunday. I think of sea salt
and of light and milk. I’m grateful
of the chance to ripple this surface
with a brushstroke. To be an expressionist,
find shade beneath trees,
press blades of grass against my palms.

3.
Lord, let me be luminous: this is not a prayer.
I am verdant. I am shaded colors
that glow, maintain wonder. Somewhere
in a desert outcrop a stone moves
with the wind’s embrace,
and in this place I am breathing
but there is no life at all.

4.
I have a radius, and it relates
to this object at my side—these blades
of grass and the stone. Perhaps
this is how the ancients measured
themselves, like the width of a forest
in increments of felled tree trunks.

5.
There is a dawnness about me.
I’d like to see it, the sun
rising on my sleeping face, the quarter
moon a fingernail in a pail of blue.
But this would be mockery. I pried
my own eye open and spit in it—
this language has a limit, and the sun
is not a nectarine floating in wine.

6.
No. I am a type of locust.
But I enjoy this kind of flattery.
I have my fortune written in red,
and aside from the object at my side
I am naked, wretched.
Set ablaze and charring these blades
of grass, my palms pressing them to ash.

7.
Wake and imagine the moonlight
brooding above me. It is night
and the world is burning from the fire
I set, my negligence.
I’ve always enjoyed this time
of night when the scents of thyme
and ginger root waft from the kitchen
and the clock has frozen, needs rewinding.

8.
These wrinkled palms are maps,
the blades of grass are fingertips.