This is an easy time to wish you did not work
with your hands. When every person
on Earth is told to stay six feet from everyone
else’s messy, lurking petri dish of a body,
it is understandable that you might momentarily
curse your choices, collapse onto the couch
in the back room of the best job you’ve ever had
and cry like there is no tomorrow. Because
there isn’t. When mere proximity’s a death knell
the world over, your days of coaxing release
from the soft tissues of your fellow humans
are numbered. How many hundreds of muscles
put up their grim dukes, at first; how many
thousands of others felt your fingers’ insistence
and let go their oldest story – telltale red
of blood vessels dilating under skin, your work
working. How many have cried on your table.
How often you wiped your own tears on a sleeve
while gliding down an upper trapezius, stretching
a piriformis, cradling suboccipitals until both
of you breathed deeper. When this is all over,
there may be no normal to which to return
but you will still have your hands; you will still
know the answer to the question of why a body,
how change that seems so sudden it knocks
the wind out has been building this whole time.
