PALMS



My wife reads palms.

She holds them up in front of her face like a child’s
first Christmas ornament her eyes
tracing ridged constellations across invisible
boundaries planted in the recipients palm.

“Think of it as a photo album of everything
you have ever felt, a biography of touch.”
She says smoothing my fingers into a placid
oath pledging allegiance to latitudinal

skids fenced across the limp fruit of my wrist—
a dashed horizontal trench, calculus of light
skin blushed into the coral pulp of thumb.
My wife blinks into a pond of fingers

Smiles across the peeled callous shell
drip of wood, the season a father
instructs his six year old how to clutch the winged
timber of Louisville slugger.

The glimpse of chin hushed over a bubble of small
knuckles chanting rote bedroom introits
visualizing the cumulus squeeze, the electric
nighttime bolt of deity.

Or the scratchy anxiety of Homecoming autumn
errant scabs nervous balm
oyster hands oblivious how to navigate
the edifices of the female body.

My sins, of course, she can see those too.
A fish line casting ripples
below the surface of pigment cropped
lid—toolbox of lies

She espies the denim rags of my vocation
greasy dead-end splats daubed
fingertips waist slumped over a rusty
hood like a question mark all

day tinkering with oily machine innards all
my life—a failure.
My wife tells me not to worry. That the curved
crescent bow swerved

cul-de-sac assures me covenants of laughter
the quiet hush of spring,
the secret hymn of a husband still getting-off
while he observes his lover

draped in the calm still morning quietude of winter
when gruff moisture abandons his
sentences in alphabetical buds, licking the salt
white from her thighs.