my father’s hands.
I walk on the same ankle bones
of a three-million-year-old amphibian.
In such a world is the nature
of limbs, the floating rib,
the creation of bone
grown long from infancy
and nerve following pathways known
to the future
from the past when God’s arm, once wing,
once fin,
swam through an ocean of creation
and reached out
to climb the shores of a world
without a knowing care for what we would become,
our evolved hand,
sinew giving way for monsters and kings
for prayer and the trigger finger
becoming stronger,
the human muscle,
and all this from a single cell.
Oh the beautiful water-filled
of our kind
and the gods of creation
waiting for beginnings.
We are their love, their misery
awaiting the new
betrayal, betrayer of the elegant, tender bones.