a new Vocabulary

Without thought, without knowledge or consideration, without choice, his two shimmering hands slipped from the pockets of his navy blue slacks.  They began to rise automatically, as if they were angels, as if they were made of light and air.  They were still cold from the waiting and from the walk to the grave.  But without a thought to the icy knife that the wind here always seems to hold, his hands escaped their mid-march burrows and--forming themselves into loosely held fists--floated effortlessly up to the mid-point of his torso.  There, like creatures from the deep achieving the surface, each rolled on its back and as his fingers unfolded slowly revealing the geography of his open palms…

Then, quietly, they sunk back into the murky world down below.                                                          

The gesture was something that Milo had learned when he was very young.  It was second nature to him now.  And over the years he had become a student of the nuance of its use and its graceful placement in relation to so many of the more poignant moments of being:  for funerals, farewells, moments of loss and moments of elation, births and weddings, even (sometimes) in the after throes of sex, this subtle lift of hands and letting go was the perfect punctuation in situations that would only be ruined by resorting to the old worn down verbiage.  

It said so much that could not be said.   It was--like certain glances, some kisses, most every form of dance--approaching the impossibility of words, the approximations of feelings, the limits of language in the face of the limitless meanings.  It was an acknowledgment of the rift between two feeling hearts, two aching souls.  

It could in fact be said that the gesture itself had become a word, a voiceless simplicity of syllables, a complexity of feeling filtered not through dictionaries or media but through its repetitions in real lives,.  Here in this country there was a creeping isolation that was finding a new tongue, and this soft gesture--hands rising and then releasing finger by finger the burden of this world--was the beginning of a new vocabulary.