warm water hands

"Maybe we thought we stopped, like some great trick of the magnets that hold our flesh to these words, and these days to our bones, and our hopes always a little further ahead—still looking back over its shoulder, still making eyes and taking our hands in warm water. I thought we surely had stopped. There was that rumbling low and my chest dribbling grease. There was you, some curvature of moons, that I might collapse into, turn flesh without flesh, and smiles stripped and arcing, of pulsing whiteness and upturned. But it had not stopped, and these arms strike as not comets, and my cracks don't inflict your—those smart eons. So I turn as the Earth, and am some light behind but great future."

Ian William L.