Work of Hands

Rishma Dunlop

2006-05-08T11:51:00.000-07:00

Somewhere, a woman is writing a poem

Somewhere, a woman is writing a poem
in the twilight hours of history, lavender turning to ash,
as time spills over and the moon unfurls her white-pitched fever in
the songs of jasmine winds. The young woman I was climbs the
stairs, the moon's pale alphabet filling her. She tucks her child into
bed, bends over her desk in the yellow lamplight, frees her hand
to write, breaking through the page like that Dorothea Tanning
painting where the artist's hand gashes through the canvas, fingers and
wrist plunged to the bone. She writes a dark, erotic psalm, an elegy,
a poem to grow old in, a poem to die in.

Somewhere, a woman is writing a poem,
as she gives away the clothes of her dead loved ones,
stretching crumpled wings, her words rise liquid in the air,
rosaries of prayer for the dying children, for the ones who
have disappeared, the desaparecido, and for the ones who
have been murdered. She writes through the taste of fear and
rage and fury. She writes in milk and blood, her ink fierce and
iridescent, rooted in love. Somewhere, a woman who thought
she could say nothing is writing a poem and she will sing forever,
blooming in the dark madness of the world.

Memento Mori

Estelle unbuttons her blouse, lays my
hand on the jagged scar where her breast
used to be. She wants me to tell her she is
still beautiful.

I feel her heart beneath the ribbed wall
milk-veined softness knifed into a cavern.
She tells me her husband has not been able
to look at it yet, this place on a woman's body,
nuzzled and suckled and cupped by infants
and lovers.

Her gesture recalls my
first lover, his teenage body, long six foot
stretch, lean limbs, every rib visible, the
surgical scar after the mending of a collapsed
lung. I used to breathe into that curved mark
above his heart, lay my head against its pulse.

Three decades later, I realize my lover
has that same six foot stretch of bones, that
tender ribcage.

How we return, full cycle, to first love.
While ashes that rise meet ashes that fall
we become the world for a while, the rose
of each lung blooming inside.

All this contained in the memory of my hand
on Estelle's heart, her absent breast, sweet flesh
excised into terrible beauty. I tell her she is beautiful,
despite her husband's averted gaze, that she will continue
to be loved.

It can not be otherwise.
For her mother has named her with human faith.
Estelle, her name a star.

Poems from Reading Like a Girl, Windsor: Black Moss Press, 2004. Copyright ©
Rishma Dunlop 2004

Eva Tihanyi

2006-05-08T11:47:00.000-07:00

HANDS

1.

It: the universal pronoun of everything

She’s not sure how it happens
but it does

She gives birth, becomes new,
a fresh version of herself
moving in a world more dangerous
yet more beautiful
than what it was

She balances lightly
along the invisible seam
between thought and word,
becomes once again
conscious of amazement

Is amazed by what
she still feels for him,
how in the beginning
she wore his dark love on her throat
like a cameo, like a hand

Now loves him more deeply
though depth is not always passion

Recognizes
that if this is a sadness,
so too is love

2.

Wonder: August,
lush and muscular,
clouds moving
against a plum and sinew night,
air heavy on skin,
palpable

She rolls it silently on her tongue:
plum and sine, palpable
her mind pliant, plying through words,
hand through fur, feet
through long, soft grass

He stands by the window,
arms crossed, hands hidden

Dark sky, he says

Rain

3.

She waits in the cooling dark, watches
the clouds give way to stars, envies
the cat curled against his heart,
its trust instinctive as purring

It takes the warm rhythms of his hand,
gives back its pleasure

She, too, used to be able to do this
freely

In his hands she was a homecoming,
soul and body one

Now there’s a faltering wedged between them,
a sudden virgule she can’t turn
into a hyphen’s small wisdom

Attempt at understanding:
futile as grabbing dust motes
in the curtain-filtered moonlight

All she knows: how much
she wants to write herself home
into his hands

HANDWRITING

Hand, writing
Writing hand
Writing: hand

Right-handed
Left-handed
Backhanded
Underhanded
Have a hand in it
Hands up
Hands down
Hand in hand
Hands of time

Handout
Handmade
Hand-me-down
Hands on
Hands off
Play the hand
Handle

Handcuff
Hand job
Hand gun
Handshake
Shaking hands
Hands tied

Give me a hand
Hand it over
Hand me your hands
Unhand me

Susan McMaster

2006-05-08T11:36:00.000-07:00

Water Paper Stone
(a word-litho birthday card for Penn Kemp)

Could I lean into, press my hands onto this stone
with such energy of friendship that all bumps and runnels flatten,
could I roll it so hard that colour transfers
direct from my hands
to yours
the paper
between us carrying
a re-prise of the richest hues of our hollers while yet
marking each edge sharp
sharp
press here
and here
on op
this double-lobed o
loop, this o-
penned
to
nal,
could I swoop greased whorls, raze acid, cut space,
wash water, stream, flush this bland polished flat with all the soaring years hanging transparent on layers of a-lines,
Ah, lady, here's a birthday card cut to absorptions beyond first seeing, a hand-on-hand print, digging through stone to shape water mould paper –
mark our re/verse in/verse ob/verse re/fold of the loop- a-laughing word.

(unpublished, (c) Susan McMaster, Ottawa, 2004)

Lately, she remembers (March)

Her palms are hungry.
Oh, other parts too,
but in the night, now he’s gone,
and even the cat finds
elsewhere to sleep,
it is her palms that ache
for the feel of his shoulder,
right there, in the centre
of her hand, where the bones
come together, where the flesh
sparks at a touch.

The heart, she calls it
to herself, much more real
than the erratic muscle
that lodges over her stomach,
stutters when she climbs
the stairs too fast,
burns and knocks,
a complaining roomer
always ready to whine.

In the rain-pattered night
she rubs palms against the sheet –
his hip – his shoulder –
how they fit as she rolls
onto her side, as she smooths
her hand down a muscled arm,
slips it over his chest,
circles, presses
till the nipple hardens,
tucks knees against thighs,
soft fur rubbing
as she strokes further down,
strokes the curl of hair
under the slow ribs,
down the feathered belly,
cups a soft rise.

In the flat, empty bed,
to the beat of rain,
she covers her mouth,
brings a tongue into that crease.

Cups her heart.
Licks it dry.

from Until the Light Bends (Black Moss, 2004), (c) Susan McMaster

Mary's Desecration

2006-05-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

Looking for something beautiful
in the woods
behind an old Kentucky monastery,
I find a grey, stone statue
of Mary,

tall,
smooth,
in modern design,
long lines,
full robes
that drape over her shoulders,
over her breasts
then fan out
as if opening to the wind.
Her long neck
holds
her head up;
her eyes behold yours.

My eyes are drawn to
her chest
where crude, rough-hewn,
misshapen hands
B small, disproportionate hands
pasted together in prayer B
protrude from her breastbone,
phallic-like,
squashing her torso,
B not hands
sculpted by the artist
but someone=s sacrilege,
a strident appendage,
an afterthought to hide something,
or to draw the observer’s eye
away from some offending line
to these supplicant fingers.

For added measure,
beside her has been placed
a hand-painted sign:
PRAY PRAY PRAY.

On the ground in front of her
a glass jar holds a one-dollar rosary;

I wonder
what monk passed her
in the woods one day,
thought to himself, I can fix this,
and hurrying back to the grounds,
painted this sign,
spoke to a sculptor friend who crafted these hands,
and days later on collecting them, ran back up the hill
with his box of props and adhesive,
stuck these praying hands to the statue himself,
arranged the sign and the glass jar
containing the rosary,

then satisfied,
stood back
to behold his creation

Carlinda D'Alimonte

Different Worlds

2006-05-02T08:33:00.000-07:00

Watching the news with my daughter
we lean against each other,
her young body folding into mine,
her slender hand in mine.

The Northern Alliance has just taken Kabul.
The camera exposes shrouded women
in a sunny market.
One
tosses back
her burka,
exposing squinting eyes,
a radiant smile,
hands that come to life
as they fondle produce,
fingers for a moment free to touch.

An Afghan vendor rages:
Disgusting. Cover your face.
The woman swiftly complies.

Beside me my daughter stares,
questions:
“Why is she is disgusting?
“Why should she cover her face?”
With faith concludes,
“That’s mean! We’re lucky. Our leaders
wouldn’t let that happen to us.”

She needs to believe this,
turns to me,
in the silence, sees my downcast eyes, feels a trace
of the shudder I cannot suppress

as I consider
what made the Afghan woman cower,
what made her swiftly bow her head,
transform her face to a stony mask,
roll the daylight out of her life
with her own
deft hands.

Carlinda D'Alimonte

Fouled Bride

2006-05-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

Early in the morning
on her wedding day
she traipsed off to the
aesthetician,
had two broken nails,
replaced on the index and middle fingers
on her left hand
B false nails glued over her own B
painted in bright red polish.

Late afternoon
at the church,
as she stood before the alter
in her silk dress
beside her groom,
the organ playing,
the soprano lifting everyone
into the heavens,
she saw it first:
two quarter moons of red nail polish
and white crusty glue
where the false nails had fallen off.

By the end of the day,
after the vows were made,
photos taken,
six-course dinner served,
speeches delivered,
dancing stilled,

after all those eyes
looking her way,
she had become adept at
curling those two fingers
under her thumb,
into her fist,
below the table,
under his collar,
between the folds of her white dress.

Carlinda D'Alimonte

Success for Every Student

2006-05-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

Success for Every Student
48" h x 84" w
1990
CLICK FOR LARGER PICTURE

Embroidered and quilted textile

Success for Every Student was the motto of the London Board of
Education when "Whole Language" was de rigueur. I asked the students from Junior
Kindergarten to Grade 8 at one public school to write the motto without
any assistance. One of the the youngest students traced around her hand.
The work was bought by several corporations and presented to the retiring
Director.

Kirtley Jarvis

Adapted from Changing Place

2006-04-25T10:13:00.000-07:00

You watch everything
invisibly
preparing
(chopping carrots for couscous over the
open brazier,
haggling in the market
dandling a child
separate
& certain
to serve is to control.

I stoop at the lintel
to enter the world of women
out of solid sunlight
into the malleable dark.

Eyes enlarge.
Shapes emerge.
Welcoming the wave
of brown hand, how tenderly

how tentatively to reach
to point of crossing
a span of white room.

Henna intricate
on your hand, each finger its own design
the palm crossed
on your feet & ankles.

You paint me as if I knew the flame
the stir of red mud in the pot
drawing me in even
when I lose the thread to difference.

The yearning as we meet
you to know, I to be.

We are each other’s fantasy.

Penn Kemp, Changing Place (Fiddlehead, 1978), with author's permission

Gary the Gardener

2006-04-20T08:03:00.000-07:00

I hear the scraping
in the garden.

Rocks are moved
and worms that were dead
come to life.

We didn’t know
that eternity was in a sod,
literally,

and that the universe was unrolling,
as it should,
before our eyes
and beneath our feet.

You took my hand
and poked my fingers into God.

I blinked at immortality
before it disappeared.

John J. Guiney Yallop

"The Visitor"

2006-04-18T19:32:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from a short story entitled "The Visitor". Today the twenty minutes of penmanship practice was half over when Mark eased himself into his desk seat. He began, by himself, the conscious examination of posture that is always the first step towards good penmanship, according to Sr. Eustace. His legs were straight forward, his feet planted squarely beneath the desk top. His back was tilted only slightly forward, but without arching his spine. The full length of his forearm from the elbow to the wrist was resting very lightly on the desk and the edge of the paper. Mark was left-handed but Sr. Eustace had never tried to change that. She did tell him once that in the old days teachers would wrap pupils on the knuckles with a bamboo cane if they were caught using their left hands ever. Tony had listened in and grinned as he made a jerking motion with his left hand that the nun alone was not able to see.
Perfecting the vertical loops of the small "l's" and the graceful double curves of the capital "F's" and "T's" had been difficult for Mark. Always with a fountain pen and wet ink he had to be careful not to smudge his work. Being left-handed and writing from left to right meant the palm of his hand automatically followed over the writing smearing it if he was too fast or not careful. Mark was being especially careful paying particular attention, almost sounding his big elliptical "O's" as he was writing them when. "Oh!" Something small and sharp stung him in the back. The dart consisted of a straight pin rammed through a spit ball of wadded paper. (it). dropped to the hard linoleum tile floor with a click. Tony let out an unconvincing cough to cover his grin and Sr. Eustace found him out, and Deirdre was now laughing. She turned her head sideways to share her delight with Mark, but he was remorsefully somber, not wanting to further offend Tony. Mark could not face Deirdre, so he forced his gaze out the window to the school yard and the bushes beyond. He only listened to the cracking of the strap.

Frank Beltrano

Building a Log Cabin

2006-04-18T19:23:00.000-07:00

Scott Manning

At the Dentist

2006-04-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

Richard Gilmore

Father and Son

2006-04-18T12:51:00.000-07:00

Kara, Dave, and Harrison Meulensteen

The Big Day

2006-04-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

'A future brother-in-law helps his best friend put the finishing touches on his wedding day attire.'

Heather Lynch

Benedictions in Paris

2006-04-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

Back from Paris. Went to a funeral of a bishop in Notre Dame. He was confessor to the Latin Quarter in the '20s, a parish priest in the occupation and finally a kind of priest trainer. The choir were student priests robed in exquisite turquoise. The hand movements to direct the singers and the congregation were perfectly co-ordinated among several boy conductors. The hands looked like spiralling birds.

It was a plain used coffin. But he must have lived like a king. Nice residence, the seine, artists, song. And other rites.

Then up to Sacre Coeur for the choir of nuns. I was startled by the same hand movements as they sang among candles the soloists sounding like they knew the most frightful secrets.

I went to Montmartre graveyard to get more shots of Nijinsky's tomb for my next book's cover. My hands for the first time don't appear in the shots. But a black graveyard cat does, ruffled by a wind, tail swaying. Then a blue tin sepulchre and next a row of peaked tombs including that of an exiled Romanov teenage princess. There is another tomb with an inner light. The row of tombs resemble exactly the roofs of Paris I had taken earlier from the steps of Sacre Coeur on Montmartre. Snow over blue and green. Perhaps this is a design of some transcendental tourist board.

I also saw an exhibit of Coptic funery items at the Louvre. Pictures of Annubis and Osiris helping a Christian into the grave. Lots of sculpture of sacred hands. There is a whole cult of these. Especially of John the Baptist of course. There are significant things about those number of fingers extended, where are the ones not shown. There are municipal contests about where the 'missing ones' are (as three or two are extended for certain blessings). One finger is supposed to be in St. Jean De Marianne in the Alps where the Savoys come from. I saw the church there last year. John's finger is there. I saw a skull of his at the Sultan's place in Istanbul.

Post-mortuary dismembership must be so disconcerting.

Richard Rathwell

Laundry

2006-04-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

A woman in Cameroon uses her hands to wash clothing on the laundry rock behind her living quarters.

Carissa MacLennan

Making Music

2006-04-18T09:55:00.000-07:00

Local men and women in Cameroon create music with their hand-made instruments.

Carissa MacLennan

Braiding

2006-04-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

Local girls in Cameroon spend hours braiding a woman's hair.

Carissa MacLennan

Tattoos

2006-04-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

Local artists use the traditional technique of bamboo tattooing in Thailand.

Hand Maid

2006-04-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

She claimed to be a reader of palms
who could foretell my romantic fate.

"Your future is in the palm of your hand," she concluded.
"Redundant from a palm-reader," I thought.

I dismissed her $10 prognosis
and left clutching my tired heart.

Sonia Halpern

ELEGY FOR A CARPENTER

2006-04-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

I first felt when I was five or six
Where shrapnel had scarred my father’s scalp
And startled, his hands never did again
Tousle my hair. A uniform vanished from the attic.

And his hands grew thick with flesh from labour.
They built homes as easy as some spun talk
And my hand was tiny in his when we walked
Through the mud about spangling houses.

Sundays saw him out with farmers, his friends.
Their hands would ruck in the firm good earth
About green shoots. Or we would enter dim forests
Spotting the white puffs of mushrooms

After shuddering storms. The winters brought a whiteness
To his hair and took him to the basement and the building
Of bee boxes. How I cursed then his thin white hair
And wished out balding under the sun’s intense witness.

There comes an awful droning from his last box
And though my words are gibberish to them
As this bee’s business is to me,
I have read the texts on how two queen bees battle

And now issues the flight from their threshold.
I keep a good bystander’s distance
From the busy swarming, the thrumming
Through narrow passage. My words prove poor tools

Now that his poor head lies underfoot where white is black.

Joe Paczuski

Artemisia Gentileschi

2006-04-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Praise be your vantage point (1593 - 1653)

I. Artemisia,

before the maid with her babe
poses as your Virgin and Child,
she betrays you, lets in Agostino
Tassi, the friend your father hired
to teach you perspective.

And he does –
plugs your screams
deflects your dagger
A virtuous woman keeps a dagger by her bedside?

And again –
shoos his wife away
says he'll marry you
promises your father
a nozze di riparazione
instead steals his painting
that not your rape enrages your father

Afterimage (post-trial) –
you're called Puttana! Whore!
& married off, out of sight

your life and landscape displaced –
still, your hands paint you into
a new perspective:

Risorgimento, Rebirth –
1st woman in the Accademia and the Uffizi Gallery
Galileo and Cosimo Medici, your allies

Katerina Fretwell
Parry Sound, Ontario, 2003
Note: nozze di riparazione = marriage of reparation

First Woman in Accademia dell' Arte, Florence

II. Artemisia Gentileschi

Creatrix,

on the chaste white canvas
you whip force into form

your colourful embrace
is the stay of time

against the odds, this body of work
a gendered triumph

and the slow stroking:
seeing becomes being

Each lash of the sable brush
imprints a critical mass:

the birth or death of
Incandescence

No random fling this votive act

Nor do you diminish your rape by recanting it
At his trial your father's friend, your teacher
the prosecutor had your fingers racked to extract a denial?

Yet "Judith and Holophernes"
your masterpiece:
slays all savage force they sanctioned

Katerina Fretwell
Parry Sound, Ontario, 2003

Trial of Agostino Tassi, May 14, 1612

III. Artemisia,

The Sibile, Instrument of Torture, is used on you:

palm to palm like Duhrer's
Praying Hands, but bound,
& squeezed of supple strength
with each turn of the screw,

your hands are on trial –
bloodied from denying Tassi's lies:
you spread your legs
for him, his patrons, commissions.
You, greater artist, but lesser gender.

His hands, his strength, his privilege
preying on you
while he paints Muses with your father
for Cardinal Borghese.

The cord's bite, your father's nod,
rings of fire, this Inquisition;
your white sleeves reddened.
If a woman is raped, she invites it.
A virtuous woman keeps a dagger by her bedside?

O Artemisia, your courage
is on record – between the lines.
Your hands a prayer
stained by the centuries,
a palm crossed.

Katerina Fretwell
Parry Sound, Ontario, 2003

"Judith and Holophernes" in Uffizi Gallery, Florence

IV. Artemisia,

it's your piece hanging on the wall:

Hands aching from Sibile's vice, you stroke
muscle & sinew into Judith's arm
sawing through the tyrant's neck, and into
the maid, Abra's. They wrestle him down,
their fury and disgust in stark relief –
his head, his blade in shadow,
his knees bent, head down
pushed into the soiled sheets,
background black as intent.

Not passive like Caravaggio's Judith,
yours, true to deed,
is filled with riparazione
for half of humanity oppressed.
The act of painting
Judith and Abra's triumph
anoints your crushed
fingers, you, chosen Creator.

Katerina Fretwell
Parry Sound, Ontario, 2003

Basement playroom, 1955

V. Artemisia,

it's often those close to us:

lone male in a 50s household;
two widowed sisters, boy, girl.

his male privilege handed him
the run of the house, of me.

Too old to play Doctor, we were 11, still
he cupped my swells and curves

and clutched his budding
phallic universe –

my teacher of perspective.
His Intro to Anatomy

was underhanded – other specimens
later came up short.

Katerina Fretwell
Parry Sound, Ontario, 2003
2003

Rape Trial, Halifax, November 11, 1972

VI. Artemisia,

she too is under twenty
and she too, twice violated:

A girl hitches a ride
with 7 bikers, shares a bottle,
tours their clubhouse.

Threatened with a spiked ball
on a chain and growling Doberman,
she succumbs, passes out

before the 7th biker plus dog
get their licks. Sentenced
to seven years in the pen,

the seventh gets off with less
since the girl fortuitously
faints dead away –
the bikers swagger en camera.

Called Whore! the victim, her family
flee, their sentence, yours, Artemisia –
life and landscape displaced.

Katerina Fretwell
Parry Sound, Ontario, 2003

Cornell University, Spring 1963

VII. Artemisia,

it still happens:

Spring Fling at Cornell's jock frat –
petting to penetration in 5 dates flat.

My beau's surprise, instead of the women's dorm,
I'll share his bed. (No money for a taxi getaway!)

Cornell boys marry co-eds, practice on Wells girls,
but I'm saved by frozen muscles, no way in.

Instead we lie like curved spoons, forced
to swallow the medicine, I shower off at 4 am.

That Sunday I seethe while the band plays
The Big Bamboo, count the hours till the end.

My psychiatrist hands me a line, You wanted
to satisfy your curiosity.

Anger penetrates my paralysis
over mom's death orphaning me,

I escape this whoredom, transfer
to a Canadian University, hands off.

Katerina Fretwell
Parry Sound, Ontario, 2003

Hands Always Remember

2006-04-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

A mind may forget things,
they slip away into the night or
fade back into death in a moment of idleness
a mind is a leaky amphora for the sweet wine or bitter potions of memory,
and is rather indiscriminate of what goes, and what stays.
But hands remember well.
A pianist's hands remember a tune and how to play it
even after he is long deaf and can't remember his grandchildren's names.
A gambler's shaky hands remember the feel of the cards or the die,
even after he is broke or reformed or both.
An artist's hands remember the patterns and subtleties of the brush.
even after they swear they will never paint again.
A violinist's hands remember every sweep and vibe of the bow,
long after they have failed to be moved by the music.
An author's hands remember the desperate flow of writing before the inspiration disappears
even after the manuscripts lie long forgotten in a binder in an attic.

Hands don't forget because we would lose so much if they did
Hands will always take care of their owners.
Hands will remember, Just in case your past rises up to face you, one last time.
Hands always remember.

Trevor Plint

The Poet’s Hands

2006-04-18T09:18:00.000-07:00

The poet’s hands are the only things catching the light suspended from the garage as we lounge, in wait for the coming storm. It dangles from an orange extension cord, in the mild wind it turns, brightening and then darkening the yard, dangling, dancing the light. For a moment the world is bathed in darkness and then, there and for just a moment again, the light hanging there makes clear those instruments, lovely and deadly, capable of such beauty, such destruction. Death and life and love and the storm, all together wrapped up in those ten fingers. The sky above is alluring, the same colour as the ink staining his fingertips; the telltale blue and black, which spills, like blood, and which won’t wash off because he is the one who is guilty, his hands are the parchment, his body is. The poet’s hands are full, they hold a half empty glass bottle of strong amber liquid and a half full chipped mug of the same. The poet’s stomach and my own hold the other half. He smiles and his hand reaches the bottle across his long lap to me, he says he’s been sending me telepathic messages, for hours now, for years, and to be fair, I’ve felt them the same way I feel it when the storm moves faster and faster still across the world to where we are, with the same apprehensions, the same anticipation, the same earthy need. I’ve been smelling it in the air. I take the bottle from these poet’s hands and move it to my mouth. The light has turn itself around and rested, leaving us happily in quiet darkness, but there is lightning in the sky far away and I see his face for just a second, and his mouth is open and his eyes are open and I smile “You want to set my insides to fire?” I am bold now, like crass sudden claps of thunder, and he follows me, like lightening, laughing, because his message came to me in a bottle. I take a long drink from it, and as the amber liquid washes about, like liquid gold in my stomach, I shake my head and my body shivers.
“Actually, yes”. He laughs again and it’s the three beat rhythmic laugh he makes when he knows he’ll soon be flopping about in the rain and using a clean half bottle of Gibson’s Finest as protection against the cold hardness of the ground, as lubrication for love that gets made and unmade,
The poet has moved stereo speakers, some high tech cordless magic outside to beside the house, not far from where we sit. Miles Davis trumpets from the Fillmore, slightly closer than the rumble of summer thunder whose impending vibration rumbles right now farther than that distant liquid energy, but moving fast. He not like Davis especially, but this occasion calls for magic jazz, hot and cool rhythms and the intensity of genius found only in the pulsing fingers of those most like gods: the obsessed, the driven, almost not real, almost not now. An hour earlier, the poet took me by the hand, and lured me with promises of movable jazz, jazz that can be taken with us, appealing to my need for constant artfulness, combining my needs.
Fat raindrops begin to hurl themselves from the pregnant sky, and neither of us flinches from the wet. We aren’t the flinching type, the poet and I.
He navigates us in the dark past domestic child sized trees and swings and a tame gazebo. We aren’t looking for a shelter. We find ourselves suddenly naked, somewhere between the time it takes to improve on human nature and the time it takes to debase it. The thunder shakes the whole world and we are off our feet. Lightning hits the sky, catching on the shiny side of the rain and we are on our backs, The thunder is repetitive, the thunder rolls and rolls and the poet says from on top of me “Maybe we brought it with us again” and I laugh. The inside of me is turned amber with the influence of whiskey and lust and June rain and those hands around me, my back to the ground, a slight impression of the curves of my young body, his hands in the soft brown dirt, summer angels of grass and mud.
His hands, those poet’s hands are on me, and my body is slipping wet and the ground is wet, Miles Davis is soaking, somewhere farther now, than the thunder, and still we are not flinching from the rain. The poet’s hands are on my body, the poet’s hands are on me, and the ink doesn’t drain onto my skin and I kiss the poet’s hands and they are on my mouth. There aren’t enough places for those hands, there aren’t enough places in the world for those hands, and nothing touches like the cool rain, a sort of freshness, quelling fire.
When the storm begins to slow, the poet’s hands brush stray leaves from my knotted hair. He tells me all about the meaning of everything, and he is imperfect, the highest order of deceit, but those hands don’t lie. We laugh, standing straight up in the dark night. We take longer than is necessary to collect our clothing, standing naked with our backs to that sky. We can see in windows. Normal people are watching prime time TV. We hope, the both of us, that we are never normal.
The poet and I are allies. We walk together, not touching, complicit in our wet desires, in our sated need, in what we take life to be, what we take out of it, these sounds, this place, those hands. Once we are back inside, my body is forgotten as he strums a battered guitar, sounds of love and loss ring in the air, the work of his hands, and I am made, unmade. Exhausted. I call a cab, and when it arrives I don’t need to look back. These are all repeatable patterns. I leave the hands, those chords strumming softly, but take the jazz along.

Michelle Miller

my universe

2006-04-17T21:24:00.000-07:00

green and white
velvet sculptures
fade discretely
in the morning sun

silver dust
sprinkles soft
on mahogany
while swollen fingers
embrace the slender needle
and play a silent song of silk

the embroidery sings
in tranquil tones
of earth and sky

I sit barefoot
in the picture
dig my splendid hands
in the gentle browns
like a gardener
in a tropical oasis

I patiently create
my universe
the eternal stitches
a small immortal gesture
not to be forgotten
like a tender lullaby
and a kiss

I.B. Iskov