A Hand In The Situation
A threshold restrains itself yet the clock ticks.
Limits rise. Click. A moment. Not more than the patience
that stays its hand until it can’t help itself – and becomes a hand –
open, upward, a gesture of surrender or invocation (I forget which).
There are limits, but they do not rise. They snap –
a sound like bone against stone – just as you stop listening.
Patience, a wick lit too long, flares upward -
my hand, a supplicant, opens to the ashfall.
Hours unaccounted for like debts owed to a god who no longer answers.
Not more than endurance, which burns without flame,
reaches again, and again, the hand open, not in offering, but in refusal.
Hours unspool, unaccounted, unrepentant,
like leaves blindfolded in dusk, brushing walls with intense quiet.
Leaves in the dark make their small sounds. Insignificant, yes.
But they touch the walls. And the walls remember.
Time does not count itself. It waits. The leaves in the dark do not speak.
They are not symbols. They are not witnesses.
Yet they know what we know - acknowledgment is precious.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Midnight Mind, Trampoline and Flights. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Levitate, White Wall Review and Willow Review.
