Seeing quietly your hands
︎︎︎ Toby Shorin
︎ Mar 21, 2025
Seeing quietly your hands
Gestures
Gentle wrists in their movements
And in your joints
Rotating under your skin when you
Held them so carefully
You gazed down hunting for
Some recommendation
Traveling down the dendrite to a
Missing signal at the tree root
And I became overwhelmed
By the reality of another
A sticky glistening of motivation
Wrapped in a flower dusted skin
Once I dared to peek at your breasts
Pale as they hinted at an intimacy
I dare not fully yearn for
Although I’ve dared
To keep my eyes shut
And hold to the last vestige
Of a guilty dream
In which you shared with me one acknowledgment
Of sap passed between us
For trees the aching flow of new life
Year to year
Must seem like minutes
But I must leave these wanderings
For my dreaming mind to see
A tiresome zwischenzug
It begins to dawn over the meadow
The fullness of your being
A light that shows a new level of knowing
However circumspect i feel it
For mountains the light that
Melts a glacial drop over eons
Must seem like minutes
As they do for me
When I watch your thumbs
When your eyes speak clarity a movement longer
Ride, I said, you said, ride, ride, ride
Gestures
Gentle wrists in their movements
And in your joints
Rotating under your skin when you
Held them so carefully
You gazed down hunting for
Some recommendation
Traveling down the dendrite to a
Missing signal at the tree root
And I became overwhelmed
By the reality of another
A sticky glistening of motivation
Wrapped in a flower dusted skin
Once I dared to peek at your breasts
Pale as they hinted at an intimacy
I dare not fully yearn for
Although I’ve dared
To keep my eyes shut
And hold to the last vestige
Of a guilty dream
In which you shared with me one acknowledgment
Of sap passed between us
For trees the aching flow of new life
Year to year
Must seem like minutes
But I must leave these wanderings
For my dreaming mind to see
A tiresome zwischenzug
It begins to dawn over the meadow
The fullness of your being
A light that shows a new level of knowing
However circumspect i feel it
For mountains the light that
Melts a glacial drop over eons
Must seem like minutes
As they do for me
When I watch your thumbs
When your eyes speak clarity a movement longer
Ride, I said, you said, ride, ride, ride
Toby Shorin is a writer and the cofounder of research organization Other Internet. He believes that epic poetry is still possible today.