My hands are learning you.

All my life they have been open

like questions, asking,

“Who will fit here, will she be this way,

or this way?”

They extend and caress an invisible presence.

Then you slid between them;

at first they were surprised.

“This is not what we expected”, they said,

“we held ourselves here, where there was nothing,

and we learned to stroke the silky smoothness of nothing,

and became stubborn waiting for nothing.”

But you pulled my hands into yourself,

and the questions were made to retreat,

beyond the orbit of my shoulders, away,

gone.  My hands are learning you.

They are still surprised

by you.

They are no longer cold.