Touch-driven Curtain of Skin

 

Yesterday, in The Atlantic — an article of increasingly troubling scenarios,
concluding: only Putin can step back and stop a major war.

An hour later I’m listening to Ideas on CBC —
the idea being discussed: the neuroscience of touch,

and the interviewee says, If there was more touch in this world
there’d be less violence, less war.

And being a simple man of cause-and-effect I was lead
to ponder the personal life of Mr. Putin, how perhaps,

his skin has not been frequently moved by the hands
of an intimate, and concomitant to his thirsting soul,

his aggression is rising toward that final embattled scenario, whereas,
everything on earth — shuddering cinder, swirling gales of ash.

Of course it’s here where I like to believe the simplicity
of my early morning Psalter, refuting the article’s author,

by noting that God is the author of outcomes,
but on this, history appears equivocal.

Then I think, as I’m a simple man, that whatever happens,
however many seconds there’s left on that damnable clock in Chicago,

we owe it to the mystery of our breathing, the penumbra
of our own spinning star, the gardens on the margins of galaxies,

to keep repairing the human breaches with handshakes and hugs,
with greetings, with smiles, with songs — all forms of touch —

songs that frisson emotion and leaven empathy, soul and body,
our human hymn book of common brokenness.

It was Ricoeur who said everything is profoundly cracked,
but it’s Cohen we remember, he put it into music,

kept us from straying, kept us reaching toward the flickering,
emanating from these honeycomb curtains of skin.

So while the moon feels its way through your hair
and a kitten rubs its face on yours to keep you awake

and playful, and in the morning your partner
rolls over to hold you, says, Come, let’s fetch the lilacs,

and hand in hand, as you make no noise walking
on the pine-shaded path under the eternal sun —

give thanks,
for these porous, touch-craving containers of light.