gestURes

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 the most poignant moments of being.  In funerals, farewells, moments of loss and moments of elation, births and weddings, even (sometimes) in the after-throes of sex or battle, this subtle lift of hands and letting go was the perfect punctuation.  It was always better in such situations that would only be ruined by resorting to the insufficient, often worn-out words. 

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 that in its creeping isolation was finding a new tongue, this soft gesture--hands rising and then releasing finger by finger the burden of this world—was (perhaps) the beginning of a new vocabulary.  

Easily, without a striving for and yet with an inherent grace, the gesture was echoed by others beside him, across from him, at the edges and the center of the circle.  Silent voices were claiming something, standing in humble defiance, acknowledging their ancestry.  And before his father—the old man, the wise man—could be dropped into the muttering pit, none could imagine that his stiff fingers were not prepared to join them, float forward and slowly re-open, like flowers, like bursting stars.  The casket lowered into the ground seemed to echo this choreography.  His father sunk into the grave easily, in the cradling hands of this agnostic's shrug.