Skin

By Caleb Hill

Your Spirit like skin holds in place

an architecture of bones, authorities,

edicts from before time began, knits

them in cross-purposes and joints of clenching

knuckles, promise-points in stars and smoking mountains.

Your hand is heavy even in its letting go

and so gentle in its holding back;

to be held, to behold

in its hollow the cupped palm of communion,

our own hands open to be filled,

reaching out with broken fingers to surrender

to the virtue of the only vice

whose crushing can make whole.

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Caleb Hill is a cyber security technician by day and poet around the clock. His quest to find out why poetry is important has produced few poems and an endless supply of unfinished essays. He chops vegetables to give his mind a break from writing. When that doesn't work, he buys fruit (he can go through a watermelon in an afternoon). He lives in central PA with one standing desk, one sleeping bag, and six treadmills.