My hands are ahead of me;

wrinkling their skin handsomely,

giving me the finger

in their bullying upper hand manner,

somewhere in the days to come, the years to go

I remember quite well, in hindsight,

how I handled them so well, so swell,

back when we were supposed

to live lives all handy-dandy

Now they mostly just knock on wood

and wipe the ass clean;

hands off any good handiwork

Yeah, they used to grab hold,

while now mostly letting go

in a flapping prayer-flags-in-mountain-passes

kind of Buddhism, wryly

Their old gloves & mittens foul-talk them now,

up on the vestibule shelf,

the sweaty, torn pieces of shit,

all left to themselves,

forever locked in,

knowing full well they've been fingered

for the last time, penetrated no more,

never no more to be worn out,

where snow blasts one's face

and the black winds howl

Ah, this freckled, forlorn couple,

in their pre-wrinkle days,

stuck their thumbs up,

hitching me out of Scandinavia's common sense,

bursting me across Central Europe when I was seventeen;

later jolting me

out of impossible Gan Shmuel kibbutz slavery,

from Hadera early one morning,

up to the M/S Messapia in Haifa harbour,

to ride on deck five days to Milan,

hitching on up into Switzerland

with a guy on a motorbike;

me in a duffel coat and sandals

when I was eighteen

… and yeah, the very same thumbs

speeding me down the Coast Highway

from Seattle to San Francisco in 1971

in an over-populated Volkswagen Beetle,

smoking like an ocean freighter,

necessitating repeated oil can thefts

at choice gas stations along the way,

to keep us moving

Oh, and do I recall

all those Hand-El-Bars,

semiotically referred to here,

semitically grabbed tight

at a steady 20 miles per hour cadence

along the smoothly winding calligraphy

of swirling asphalt painted across fields,

through forests & towns