reviving keats
This living hand, now warm and capable of earnest grasping,
is ripe for that which wanders to its palm,
things past their prime and searching for rest,
the ooze and squish of the root cellar door that leads
to bitter turnips and slipshod angles carved by tired shovels.
This living hand, now warm and capable of earnest grasping
stretches toward the leaning tree, the one that fell toward earth,
caught between the branches of a forking oak that arrows it now
toward october’s sunset in the forest scalded by the feral fire
that burned to a hundred feet from where now I sit,
palms curled toward some metal thing that lets me tap my
memory in a code for what it means to be here now,
to write in a language that taught itself to me in single sounds.
Ah. Oh. I.
This living hand, now warm and capable of earnest grasping
does not know how to grasp rightly or what means earnest
or how the two meet together on this day
when emptiness is earnest, a peasant word,
one that shrinks at its own voice,
shy syllables that fear loneliness.
Then a release of grasping, the weakness of want,
the unfulfilled pauper, the slighted heart.
This living hand, now warm and capable,
open, empty, waiting.
