The Hands From The Face

And so analemma, life in its figure-eight tilt.

And so weeks recited in prose and in cinnabar,

a cord of lines, and the smell of nothing

exactly. Drippings of a dream you run

your fingers through, followed by the chalk

of white capsules to halt a protein’s formation

so certain hormones drift in the synaptic cleft.

Across: glaze of the imagined loss of someone

who arrived only recently, the one humming

fear that sustains. Wash and wipe, wipe and wash,

alerts of missed calls. Newborn chroma curled

along perforating branches of mammary arteries.

For most of a decade, you wanted swerves

and now you only dream of removing the hands

from the face: tocks and ticks, a fine sweep

of the numbers, and the spinning entirely imperceptible

at 1,525 feet per second. And what was it for?

Crosshatch of pleas, burnt rivulets. And so hours drying,

never evenly at the surface. And walking from one

margin of the day to the next in search of a bracket,

in search of some strained pressure, at the end of a line.