Landscape

I don’t remember how the phrase goes
—“shriveled up like a plumb” or something like that—
but that is the first thing that comes to my mind
when hypnosis sets in during the thirty-second minute of my shower.

I can picture my jovial wall of a grandmother shaking her index finger at me.
“You look like a prune,” she’d say and we’d laugh. (Not too long, though)

But it’s not a prune that I see while gazing into the sutures of my morbidly-hydrated, teenaged palms.
What I see is a landscape:

My thumb is the soil of an arid desert, triangle patterns with cracks in-between. My
ring finger is the frame for a rainforest, foliage-clad . My
index finger is a flat, fair-weathered peninsula. My
middle finger is a bloody horizon settling behind a corn-shod plain. My
pinky is a lonely bonsai tree with limbs grasping at empty air. My
palm’s deepest line is a cool stream from which my children’s children’s children’s children
will dip into
to quench their thirst for existence.