Dried Preparation of the Hand

It's not so much the missing skin

or the blood-slick bones of the hand,

which could be hailing a taxi or waving

goodbye, but the shadow of two hands

where there is one.

The pair, rising in the flat black fuzz

of shade, barely touching,

like first kissing, could still be

flesh-bound, round with life, unlike

the hand in full light, still strung

with veins and ascending with the shadows

in spindly agreement.

My father once tried to catch a falling

glass, but it exploded in his hand,

opened it like a pomegranate,

and I watched his hardness turn to pulp.

Later, I, too, would shatter glass, learn

again the thinness of the membrane

between minutes, one minute holding you

on a porch rocker in a thirsty summer,

the next inside an ambulance behind

two rectangles of sky. My father would

make the trip home that night,

stroke my head with his numb hand,

and for the first time I remember, I'd reach

my small fingers into his, hovering

between dreaming and waking,

the way the hand hovers with the shadows,

no longer alive but not yet dead.