I Wanna Hold Your Hand

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

For forty-seven years, Anne, your hand found mine
as if the body had its own shy compass,
your palm warm with errands, weather, supper steam,
the ordinary electricity of us.
I loved the small negotiations of our fingers,
thumb over knuckle, pulse answering pulse,
a language more fluent than vows.
Then brain cancer took you inward, room by room,
and left me with this amputated tenderness:
loss lodged in the bones of my fingers,
each joint remembering the shape of you.
Now couples pass, fingers nonchalantly intertwined,
and a terrible, irrepressible jealousy rises in me, within my emptiness,
not for their love, but for their sensual gestures of requited desire.