They caught my eye today
for the first time,
like tree rings of a tall oak—
well, if one was to wear them on its skin.
Fingers out,
reading the stories of the day,
they curled up from the wrist,
just beneath the light.
I stretched them and started counting.
Wondering
and maybe hoping,
they matched my number.
That there was a story here,
feeding upwards
towards the contour lines
of the knuckles.
But I couldn’t make sense
of the topography—
how some interrupted the one below
or ran back on itself,
blended,
or shifted up to another,
raising questions
if they were one line or two.
Some ran continuous
and full,
while others made it
halfway across
before yielding
to the next—
a space between them,
like the first didn’t want to risk getting cut.
Clenching my fist,
I could make them almost disappear,
but they were still there.
A tip of the hand
and I could still see them.
Only their shape was different,
circling down,
running back to myself.
And I wondered,
is that the point?
Not how many,
but the direction they’re going?
That in all these wanderings—these trials,
the top isn’t there to mark the passage of time,
but to show
the soundwaves of the soul.
— ❧ —
Poetry Corner
I was thinking about the similarities between tree rings and the lines on our hands yesterday, and this poem was born from that. Really, if you look at our fingertips, they resemble topographic peaks on a map so closely, it’s remarkable. But for this poem, I wasn’t thinking about the lines on my fingertips—I was looking at the top of my hand. There are so many that I never fully accounted for before. We tend to look at the lines on our palm, studying them for signs of something: life lines, love lines, and so on. But a study of the tops showed me something I hadn’t seen before.
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