Michael T. Smith writes

Chiromancy, a poem on gestures

Saw you across the room,

curlicue -- my hand waves to you,

till you saw me, and vis-à-vis

            your hand to mine you drew.

Across the room, purely

            planetary, our hands in syzygy

swung orbiting

in a gestural prosody.

Until, for a handshake,

            a wreck we make nonplus,

a constant movement of disconnect,

            more cubist than direct --

to com’pone by tittering,

            my fingers shaking from the meet.

I think it was your thumb

            then that winked.

Now, each other enclose,

a Mobius strip of anxious flow,

but not as if the first time,

            rather as if caresses had a memory.

Tremors of a micro kind

            do disclose what we both feel

in a loquacious act,

            but as if inebriated.

Our fingers this conversation makes:

            first one sign,

and then a whole line,

            attempting to speak what we can’t,

Which shyly they do,

            from those somersaults through the air

to us enclosing our hands two:

guess this means I love you.