The Sleeping Arm

As I hold its numb weight it grows younger, more delicately knit to blue somnolent veins. I am left high and dry while nerve endings circle the dilated roots of severed memories. A pinched anesthesia; while arterial threads track back to things once sensed on a map of ghost towns. A slow thaw, and now a delta seeks a salt water flow in shallow cold streams. Blood washes glacial backwaters, kindles capillaries that carry a surfacing alluvia. The arm tugs at my mind like a child. I flow downstream on a raft of fine green bones toward fingertips dipped in pink shells of fiery snow.