—for my husband, 2022

Science teaches that the hand’s twenty-seven bones are controlled
by thirty-seven muscles, that a quarter of the brain’s motor cortex is dedicated 
to movement of the hand, from which five fingers bend and stretch a quarter

million times over a lifetime. But let’s talk of your hands, the warm, 
sweaty-palmed, uncalloused hands that took my hand five decades ago
as the vicar spoke of cleaving ‘til death. Let’s talk of your hard-working, 

attention-to-detail hands, changing the oil in the 1973 Ford Galaxy
in our early years or laboring in pulp yards, in bakeries, on paint crews
and cattle farms to provide well for our family of two in young adulthood;

or your strong hands, tugging and lifting and caressing an aged father,
an invalid sister, a stranger bereft of hope after news of child lost 
in the early days of the Iraqi War. Let’s sing of loving, inviting, 

lighthearted hands patty-caking or itsy-bitsy-spidering with starry-eyed,
six-month-old daughter. And then let’s look at your hands today, hands
assaulted by chemo, cracked and sensitive to heat and cold,

fingers picked like well-worn wool, their nails bluing, lifting like asphalt 
shingles in September’s hurricane. Let’s study the hands that have cupped
grief and loss and joy and hope in the same moment.
                        

We know this is no mere moment,
however brief. —Robert Penn Warren

An early-October evening, the sun blooming
with begonia pinks and bittersweet reds, easing
behind the oak and evergreens; a squirrel darting
up the yellowing maple’s trunk; a blue jay, 
teasing, as he flits a little higher in the branches
enjoying, perhaps, his last fling before winter. 
The crepe myrtle’s crimson blossoms inking 
the ground and the single black-eyed Susan 
whispering Come a little closer. Get to know me
before I go. Resurrection flowers, long and tall,
little red miracles astounding in near-bare beds, 
encouraging the moment, inviting us to linger, 
to take their slender stalks in hand, to hold and 
behold their spidery blooms, to imprint their glory 
on the heart for winter.