For Nico, who talks with his hands

Over a mystical year his hands span my memory.
In a bubble of existence, a blurred reality of growth and subsistence
It was his hands that so often brought clarity.

The fundamentals unwound, broken down
With earnest gesticulation
Hands like starry exclamations, weaving connotations
Unspooling spirals of logic in the air.

Clench contracts possibility
Fist smacks sensibility
Fingers print indelibly
Pulling chewy strings out from under the limbs of poorly-constructed theory
Drawing abstract conceptuality into a thin stream of truth.

His fingers open wide and capture something invisible.

So complex a creature
And yet so perfectly, beautifully succinct.
Strife of mind, search for calm
Expressed in these five lines
Intersecting in a palm.
Like conflicting perceptions, crossing at strange angles
And him
Like a question mark
In the middle.

These hands stand as channels
Visual aid to his stories made in a vault of curiosity and quest
They never rest
They dance with his voice
And with the tiny, telling lines around his eyes.
For this brother is wise with a wisdom borne of thirst
A communication forever bursting from him
His palms outstretched
Imploring me to explore, just a little more
The ideas I take to be true.
"You are my rock here," he said
But he was mine, too.