Fingers

The body hints
In its cosmic fingering
At a kind of fingerprints,
Nature’s imprint lingering
In the thumb’s tattooed design,
Etching hidden strings
Deep inside the spine,
Like tree rings
That years have shrunk
As the human spirit wraps
Around a bony trunk
The capillary maps,
The blueprints for the soul to coil
Its identity in waves,
To burrow in the soil,
So the sinew paves
A lifetime plan
On the epithelium,
Writing in the sweep of man
On his careless thumb,
Carving orbits and initials
On the clumsy fist,
The rills and channels
Wherein we exist,
Arbitrary signatures
Of the embryonic helix,
Where the final contours,
The setting circles, fix,
A dermal imitation,
A cosmic counterfeit,
Of our own creation
On a systematic planet,
As if universes spin
Around the fulcrum
Of the insubstantial skin
From which such blessings come
As transpose the world,
The magnetic compass yearning
To be dipped and swirled
By the flesh’s turning,
The ripped and crumpled flesh
Where nature stencils
Layers of the stellar mesh
On our everyday utensils,
That from a finger’s spiral shell
Make of ordinary lines
Patterns that our loves foretell,
Ruts that shape our infant minds,
Chiseling from the cell that drew us
Solar patterns such as
Mutate through us,
And scratches such as
Genius touches.