Hand Holding

Sea otters hold hands when they're sleeping, so they don't drift away from each other.  Here's proof.

And isn't this what we're doing anytime we reach over and take another's hand in ours?

Don't let us drift apart--not in this world of wind and speed and distance.  And while I'm sleeping, let me wake again beside you.

Feeling the bones beneath the flesh when fingers laced.  Lives woven and the work set down because the only thing you can do when you are holding hands is hold hands.  You can't type or text or swing a hammer or pick at loose threads on your sweater.  You have to put down your work, your busyness, your trajectory and just...be...close...still and stilled.

And when there is no hand to hold, you fold your own in your lap and no one can tell, but you are saying prayers.  And this is another release of your own time and motion, the hands stilled and receiving the sound of new love.  For you, I'd stop the world, lacing digits until the sum increases and anything that passes the palm from here on out is lifted in the touching, never before known prints of another's outstretched offer to keep me from drifting so far into my own life that I forget to open it up and be someone's anchor.