How to Hold What Trembles

Their beauty carried its own syntax—
but the grammar was always the same.

A volatility I could read
like a sentence about to break.
Black hair falling like a curtain they can’t lift,
brown eyes shining like fired glaze,
porcelain skin showing the faintest web
of fractures beneath.

I could hear the pressure in them,
the fine porcelain singing
before it cracked.

They leaned against me
with the dead weight of a shelf-worn thing,
porcelain faces lifted toward me
as if I were the one person
who could keep them from breaking,

and I kept setting them upright.

I know that wanting.
I know how a doll can tremble
even before you touch her.

I, remembering how to hold what trembles,
opened my hands.

And they let me,
because I knew what it meant
to be too full
and too empty
at the same time.