I don’t know how to read the lines
on your palm, but I’m told it can be done.
Maybe it’s easier to read your own,
or else, it’s all hogwash.
Mine says I will be happy
but not content.
You know the difference.
It will take me a long time
to realize what it looks like.
Like an old zipper whose middle,
if you look closely, has come undone.
You must re-cinch the whole thing
to get it right again.
That’s movement. That’s yield.
The overgrown field, the petrified
body of the dragonfly, the fathomless
grooves of our footprints
at the muddied river’s edge,
how far we walked to get there?
They too are like the zipper,
which is like something else.
Which I’ve forgotten.
That’s how fast a thought can fade,
even as the lines get deeper.
That’s time. That’s rust of clasp.
I’ve been looking for a city
like the one we left, only different.
A certain kind I haven’t discovered yet.
Air between a zipper’s teeth.
I want to find it in your palm,
holding the unholdable.
A way of saying I want you
to be there regardless.
Am I reading into things?
I’d like to look at you
through a window
of a coffee shop in that city and know
you’re waiting for me.
Then, of course, because the world
is often this way, something
will bid me to turn around,
go back the way I came.
Perhaps I’ll have felt the chill air
against my hands.
Perhaps I’ll go back for gloves.
How many times will you glance up,
look out the window?
How many doings and undoings
of your jacket?
I think of a zipper growing teeth.
I think of the air—
closed from end to end—
between those teeth.

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Image: Untitled Photo by Daniel Nester