Chinese Furniture

The black wood's dulled luster: think
of Ming ladies, darkly bright capes
of hair spilling over chair backs, to their knees

or past. In the curves of armrests and legs,
clean as rib bones scoured by wind and sun,
by a sonorous hum

of silence.
It's so loud

it drowns everything

but the slithering click of green and yellow beads
between your fingers-rain striking glass,
bones rubbing past each other.
In Greece,

these worry beads are secular rosaries,
casually precious as ouzo. 
The province of men.

What about the women?
In sandscrubbed houses, the restless click
of their fingers setting salt fruit on plates,
bronze-green and purple-black against white.
The rustle of their fingers twining
through hair, to while away the minutes,
hours spent waiting
for husbands, lovers…
            
Would the Ming ladies have envied them?
Their fingers capped by jeweled talons,
they couldn't dream of touching

the spill of their hair. Perhaps 
they only tapped 
against the maddening silence
of chairs. 

I envy the beads, their cool certainty 
that my hand cannot echo

(on the T, a few hours past,
side-by-side we gripped the bar
and though the rest of my body gave in
to the promiscuity that blooms
between half-glimpsed strangers in trains
I wanted only to lace my fingers through yours,
to mold the inside of my wrist
over the fine strong mesh of bone and sinew
in yours, and I could not)

-its curves are wishbones. 

I push my fingers
into my hair's singing. 

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