Weathered

My hands are rough, cut and scratched all over.  Different parts ache from different injuries; hammer pounds and plier pinches, rock scrapes and briar stings, so that when I pick up a pen to write these pages or hold a phone for any time, my fingers tingle with the crawling sleep of some neuralgia and things I touch scratch audibly as they pass over my brittle surface.  The finest dirt has settled into the deepening lines in my fingers, filling the now visible prints with iron dark dust.  I never realized my fingerprints extended so far, almost to my palms.

It is late afternoon as I write this and the air smells different now, warm and lush, different from the cold, fern-green morning at 5:00AM and different again from last night when I returned from Manhattan, when it teased of a thunder crack – ionized and clear, as if blown through eons of angel hair, filtering out all but the hint of pure creation.