Chiromancy, a poem on gestures

Michael Smith

Saw you across the room, curlicue -- my hand waves to you, till you saw me, and vis-à-vis your hand to mine you drew.

Across the room, purely planetary, our hands in syzygy swung orbiting in a gestural prosody.

Until, for a handshake, a wreck we make nonplus, a constant movement of disconnect, more cubist than direct --

to com’pone by tittering, my fingers shaking from the meet. I think it was your thumb then that winked.

Now, each other enclose, a Mobius strip of anxious flow, but not as if the first time, rather as if caresses had a memory.

Tremors of a micro kind do disclose what we both feel in a loquacious act, but as if inebriated.

Our fingers this conversation makes: first one sign, and then a whole line, attempting to speak what we can’t,

Which shyly they do, from those somersaults through the air to us enclosing our hands two: guess this means I love you.