Hungarian Lesson
In Hungary, you know something like the palm of your hand,
not the back of it. Why are we fixated on the back?
The palm is more intimate, more active in applause
and caress, more sensitive, our fate stamped there
in bas-relief. It’s the palm that tells us
who we are, not how young, how manicured, lotioned,
bejeweled. At once erotic zone and primary instrument
of worldly grasp. Venue of all I ask for, give away,
choose to hold onto. What I pray for and whether or not
I pray at all is clasped between them, button, button,
where we kept in childhood our secret sealed
until we slipped it into the palm of whomever we chose
to deserve it. The palm can put a stop to things,
in the name of love, or cradle the face in despair.
Like the rings gyring, journaling in a tree trunk,
the etchings of my palm make manifest
the layers of self accrued in youth, the angers
clenched into me, the hopes I carried so carefully,
cupping into creases that retreat when I wave “hello”
or “goodbye,” which is hello in colloquial Hungarian,
or extend my hand to a muzzle when I don’t know the dog,
or when I press the chilled dough before rolling it out.
At first exposure to air, your palms clutch your youness
even before you leaven into toddlerhood,
and your life line deepens, deepens with age
until your fate flat-lines and eternity grins, snapping
that irreversible black cape, palming you for good.
Snow Rapture
Like a slow cold confetti of dreams
flung in uncanny formations
coded symmetries that fall out
as soon as you see them
as soon as you think you’ve
followed one flake
others surround it
like the secret service
cooperating in sly descent
to move some brilliance
covertly along
feinting back up in hesitant rapture
then settling into their gathered
dream on the ground
obscuring the ground
I remember large loose snows like these
fat white flakes studding the vast black
backdrop of a solitary evening walk
commemorating some shock-opened
door of awareness
a new chamber of understanding
annunciated by this tumbling bright version
of stillness
of everything atomized and airborne
falling aloft to organize some chaos
in my heart or thought
so I could take a long cold breath
and let it go just let it go
and think it gone
while it amasses more and ever
more in thickening drifts
