Another recycled poem. Don't remember when I wrote this. Circa 2003-2005 malamang. Dedicated to my mother :D

My memories of you are of calloused palms,
lifelines sunk deep like knife wounds,
and the whorls, arches - rising sharp,
defying an erosion of use and age,
palms branding into my own,
leaving your prints, imprinting me
with cautions, admonitions, warnings.
"Don't slouch in your seat,"
"Smile more. Nobody likes a grouch."
"If you throw one more spitball out the car,
I'll show you!"
You did. Against my eyes the reel rolls,
of shopping trips, of being handed over
to others who could provide what you couldn't.
I held your hand in the lobby
of countless doctors' and dentists' clinics.
I held your palms in the market,
on the way to school,
to sleep.
I remember. My fascination with hands
began with yours. How your fingers
tapered like mine, shaped like mine.
Our hands are the same color at the back.
we have the same blue bulb of a vein
crossing the broad V behind the knuckes,
like a desert caravan. The backs of our hands
were always dry, susceptible to a nail's
scratched down white blossoming.
But our palms are different. Yours
are my grandmother's, washing your brother's
dirty clothes up until her last breath.
Mine are smooth but for a single corn
near the nail of the middle finger.
Yours are pale in their starkness,
a martyr's beatific face.
Mine are flushed with life and youth,
a stag leaping into the woods.
Yours steadied my thoughts with a tug;
mine constantly worried, fidgeted,
sweaty and cold, tried to break free.
In my mind's eye,
I align them side by side,
judge yours the better. Or rather,
the memory of yours.
the real things have long since retreated
into the coming of my adulthood.
I no longer hold on to you
except in remembering your palm,
hot and solid against mine, a bulwark.