Still I trust enough, would give it away
to anyone who asks. To a cellist,
say, whose own hand is proof the mind
still loves its animals flitting about
under a floodlight’s stare. And among ours,
which but the most fearful wouldn’t rise
up before the encore to beat its twin?
Such faithlessness, itself a backhanded
hope, or hope’s photo-negative.
For a hand houses the most opposable
of views, its flare for pleasing fingering
into the darkest glove, air duct, rat hole.
You’ve seen this. How a hand skates around
the orbitals in de la Tour’s nocturnes:
it could fuse a skull’s soft spot, the least human
of human. And that finger of flame peering
over the frontal ridge? Some days our hands
are scarcely more than such beacons, waving
to others like them, handy in a crowd.
We deserve at least one. Improperly
supervised, though, it’s true: a bad hand
can crack a book spine or, worse, kill
a good night’s sleep falling asleep under
the body rooted at its end. That’s when
the deal comes strangest to us, an arrival
from the least of our tremblings through a shower
of nerves. Awaking, we’ve even felt the gates
open, the blood returning to its canals
through the palm’s basin open and cradling
the last thing it knew by heft and contour.
And for all its grabbing, who wants one stiff,
or limp as a fish? Almost blind, one reaches
for another, as if they were parents fresh
and clumsy enough to hand down all we want.