Imagine the weight
of four or five invisible hands.
Fat-fingered, but woven
with delicate muscle.
Imagine the pressure has equalized
into a kind of lightness,
every body moving
at the speed of breath.
Points of contact: the fingertips
dug in at the ribs, the geothermal
warmth of the abdomen.
As far north as the beating heart.
The precise number of beings
is fuzzy, but there’s nothing strange
about that. Everything’s fuzzy
just coming awake
and it’s just coming awake
that startles them,
you can imagine, the twenty-odd
gargantuan crickets,
fat thumby mothers
all, but still scared enough
by the change of rhythm
to strike out, to lift off from the torso.
The delicate extensors
of twenty-odd hexing fingers
snapped tight, tuned like a steel string
to escape velocity, everybody humming
their way to a different corner
of the same black note.
If there’s shock, you’re there to absorb it.
Contact, equilibrium. Imagine the vector
pressing your back to the mattress.
Imagine the weight.