And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness...

The Gift
Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

And in the skin of the grapes, I thought I touched you...

Your Hands
Pablo Neruda

When your hands go out,
love, toward mine,
what do they bring me flying?
Why did they stop
at my mouth, suddenly,
why do I recognize them
as if then, before,
I had touched them,
as if before they existed
they had passed over
my forehead, my waist?

Their softness came
flying over time,
over the sea, over the smoke,
over the spring,
and when you placed
your hands on my chest,
I recognized those golden
dove wings,
I recognized that clay
and that color of wheat.

All the years of my life
I walked around looking for them.
I went up the stairs,
I crossed the roads,
trains carried me,
waters brought me,
and in the skin of the grapes
I thought I touched you.

The wood suddenly
brought me your touch,
the almond announced to me
your secret softness,
until your hands
closed on my chest
and there like two wings
they ended their journey.

Your hands, trees borne away on a flood...

The Nails
W. S. Merwin

I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall
Like a calendar in one color.
I wear a torn place on my sleeve.
It isn't as simple as that.

Between no place of mine and no place of yours
You'd have thought I'd know the way by now
Just from thinking it over.
Oh I know
I've no excuse to be stuck here turning
Like a mirror on a string,
Except it's hardly credible how
It all keeps changing.
Loss has a wider choice of directions
Than the other thing.

As if I had a system
I shuffle among the lies
Turning them over, if only
I could be sure what I'd lost.
I uncover my footprints, I
Poke them till the eyes open.
They don't recall what it looked like.
When was I using it last?
Was it like a ring or a light
Or the autumn pond
Which chokes and glitters but
Grows colder?
It could be all in the mind. Anyway
Nothing seems to bring it back to me.

And I've been to see
Your hands as trees borne away on a flood,
The same film over and over,
And an old one at that, shattering its account
To the last of the digits, and nothing
And the blank end.
The lightning has shown me the scars of the future.
I've had a long look at someone
Alone like a key in a lock
Without what it takes to turn.

It isn't as simple as that.

Winter will think back to your lit harvest
For which there is no help, and the seed
Of eloquence will open its wings
When you are gone.
But at this moment
When the nails are kissing the fingers good-bye
And my only
Chance is bleeding from me,
When my one chance is bleeding,

For speaking either truth or comfort
I have no more tongue than a wound.

(1993)

You wouldn't recognize me

I have this thing about hands. And poems that speak of them. Hands, these far edges of us, to which all our warmth flows down. And then the reaching out. And the drawing in.

"......One of my friends, whose wife is a physician, went on to elaborate that when his wife's medical class dissected cadavers, the hardest task - the most psychologically upsetting for the students - wasn't dissecting faces. It was hands. He offered, "It's our hands that give us our humanity."

I guess it is appropriate that we hurt the most through them too.

Across a Great Wilderness without You
Keetje Kuipers

The deer come out in the evening.
God bless them for not judging me,
I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe
and make strange noises at them—

language,

if language can be a kind of crying.
The tin cans scattered in the meadow glow,
each bullet hole suffused with moon,
like the platinum thread beyond them
where the river runs the length of the valley.
That's where the fish are.

Tomorrow

I'll scoop them from the pockets of graveled
stone beneath the bank, their bodies
desperately alive when I hold them in my hands,
the way prayers become more hopeless
when uttered aloud.

The phone's disconnected.

Just as well, I've got nothing to tell you:
I won't go inside where the bats dip and swarm
over my bed. It's the sound of them
shouldering against each other that terrifies me,
as if it might hurt to brush across another being's
living flesh.

But I carry a gun now. I've cut down
a tree. You wouldn't recognize me in town—
my hands lost in my pockets, two disabused tools
I've retired from their life of touching you.


Open. Close. http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.in/search/label/Hands

Open. Close.

Spending most of your time at the concert watching the conductor's hands, as always.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

'Lost' composer Michael Giacchino rehearses with the Lost Live orchestra: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OILYuJQd0Lk 

Oh. His hands.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

"Your soft hand is a woman of itself,

And mine the man's bared breast she curls inside."

'Andrea Del Sarto', Robert Browning

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

At the physiotherapist's, overheard. "Yes, it will hurt like crazy, but you have to keep opening, closing that hand, the blood clots have to dissolve, it has to heal. Otherwise you will soon lose the usage of that hand, you understand?

Open. Close. Open. Close.

Don't cry."

Scars

"I am thinking of George Willard, how he left
Winesburg, Ohio. I am wondering how many
Scars he took with him and wonder if Salinger
Wasn't right, after all, when one of the heroes
In one of his books said that he had scars
On his hands from touching the people
He loved."

Page 23, 'Knowledge: The Hand of Another'
'The Book of What Remains' by Benjamin Alire Saenz

From Albors, a new piece:  http://soundcloud.com/dreimalbla/persuit-of-happiness

Contracting, and expanding

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you’d be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.

Rumi

A longing for the palms of the hands...

"My day demanded to see my passport and take my finger prints.

But I had a hidden identity. My day searched me. It did not discover my tenderness.

Will the young people of the future cultivate the earth?

We are not united in a longing for dead planets. We are united in a longing for the palms of the hands."

'The Song of the Red Ruby', Agnar Mykle, 1963, translated from the Norwegian


26/1/1984, Thursday

"It's our hands that give us our humanity"

And then a friend sends this, in reply to the previous post, Hands:

"I was once on a national US news special in my role as a military officer. In the broadcast clip, I was typing on my Mac laptop. All it showed was my hands, but friends all over the country recognized them. I found that interesting but baffling.

One of my friends, whose wife is a physician, went on to elaborate that when his wife's medical class dissected cadavers, the hardest task -- the most psychologically upsetting for the students -- wasn't dissecting faces. It was hands. He offered, "It's our hands that give us our humanity."

Learning to draw in art school as an adult, we had to draw a huge study of our own hands. I saw my father's hands in my finished product. It was very moving.

Then my stepfather was a friend of Carlotta O'Neil, Eugene's wife and widow. She remarked on Eugene's death moment that she looked down and would ever remember how beautiful his hands were..."

Hands

Watching the hands in the video below, hands that speak on their own, remembered these lines of Rabindranath Tagore, from 'Farewell, my Friend'. The old tattered yellowing notebook where I found this says that I came across these lines on 6th Dec 1987:

"Poets talk only of the face of the beloved, but what a wealth of suggestion is in the hand! All the endearments of love, its devotion, its tenderness, its unutterable longing, are in the hand.

Ladysmith Black Mambazo & Des'ree - Ain't no sunshine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owCJFW3T6Wg

Hands

My grandfather grew up holding rags,
pounding his fist into the pocket
of a ball glove, gripping a plumb line
for his father who built what anyone
needed.

At sixteen, wanting to work on
his own, he lied about his age
and for forty-nine years carried his lunch
to the assembly line where he stood
tightening bolts on air brake after
air brake along the monotonous belt.

I once asked him how he did that all
those years. He looked at me, said,
"I don't understand. It was only
eight hours a day," then closed
his fists.

Every night after dinner
and a pilsner, he worked some more.
In the summer, he'd turn the clay,
grow tomatoes, turnips, peas,
and potatoes behind borders
of bluebells and English daisies,
and marigolds to keep away the rabbits.

When the weather turned to frost,
he went to the basement where,
until the seeds came in March,
he made perfect picture frames, each
glistening with layers of sweet shellac.

His hands were never bored. Even
in his last years, arthritis locking every
knuckle, he sat in the kitchen carving
wooden houses you could set on a shelf,
one after another, each one different.

"Hands" by Jack Ridl, from Broken Symmetry. © Wayne State University Press, 2006

A message weighing nothing

"The post office at Auxonne is small and the postmistress has blue eyes. I have been there only twice.
The first time was to send you a parcel; as the postmistress weighed it on the scale, I imagined your hands opening it.
"Four kilos, three hundred grams."
In a parcel, wrapped by hand, there is a message weighing nothing; the receiver's fingers may unkot the string which the sender's tied.

In the post office I saw in my mind's eye your fingers untying the knot I tied at Auxonne....."

John Berger