What the Body Keeps

I will forget your name before I forget your hands.

This is not a prophecy.

It already happened.

I'm telling you now

so you understand

why I held them longer than necessary

that last afternoon in October

when neither of us knew

it was the last afternoon in October.

The hands:

small scar below the left thumb,

a story about a fence,

a dog,

a summer you told me about

in the dark of a different season

when we were new enough

to trade our childhoods like currency.

I am seven years old

and my mother is still the age

I am now.

She doesn't know this yet.

Neither do I.

We are in the kitchen

and she is teaching me something

I won't understand until I'm forty

and by then she'll be someone else,

softer at the edges,

the way photographs go

when handled too often.

Forty:

the year I finally make the soup right.

The year I understand the kitchen.

The year I call her and don't say

I get it now

because some translations

only happen inside.

Here is what I know about endings:

they were always middles,

we just didn't have

the right angle yet.

Your hands again.

I keep returning to your hands

the way a tongue finds

a missing tooth —

not looking for it,

just noticing the absence

has a shape.

Before the fence, before the dog,

before the summer that made you

the person who would tell me about it —

you were just a child

running through sprinklers

in a yard I'll never see,

becoming, becoming, becoming.

I didn't know you then.

I won't know you later.

For a brief, improbable window,

I knew you completely

and spent most of it

assuming there was more time.

My mother's hands.

Your hands.

My own hands, now,

catching the light

the way hers did

in that kitchen,

that morning,

the lesson I didn't know

I was receiving.

The soup:

too much salt the first hundred times.

A revelation on the hundred and first.

What I thought was talent

was just duration.

What I thought was love

was also just duration,

and I mean that as the highest praise.

I will forget your name before I forget your hands.

I want you to know:

I fought the order.

I did not choose it.

The body keeps

what the body keeps,

and grief, it turns out,

is not a thought.

It's a fence.

A dog.

A scar below the thumb.

The shape of an absence

my tongue already knows.