Two immense hands

Dandled your infancy.

Later the same hands quietly

Positioned you in the crawl space

And fed you the pills,

Gloved so you would not recognize them.

When you woke in the hospital

You got help to recognize

The fingerprints inside what you had done.

You could not believe it. It was hard

For you to believe.

                                   Later, inside your poems

Which they wore like gloves, the same hands

Left big fingerprints. The same

Inside your last-stand letters

Which they wore like gloves.

Inside those words you struck me with

That moved so much faster than your mouth

And that still ring in my ears.

Sometimes I think

Finally you yourself were two gloves

Worn by those two hands.

Sometimes I even think that I too

Was picked up, a numbness of gloves

Worn by those same hands,

Doing what they needed done, because

The fingerprints inside what I did

And inside your poems and your letters

And inside what you did

Are the same.

The fingerprints

Inside empty gloves, these, here,

From which the hands have vanished.