I do not recognize my hands, today,
hide-wrapped and rough,
fingers moving all as one, a unit lacking youth’s independence,
working like
a team of horses, fingers yoked in tandem,
brushing crumbs or combing hair,
reaching out
claw-like, deliberate, mechanical.
Gone is the fluidity
that typed like a piano etude,
that tested the strength of rain
fingers splayed, palm up to the lowering sky.
They seem, now, more like my father’s hands,
leathered, laced with welted scratches from thorn or cat,
thick fingers slightly curved, open,
as if holding the memories
of tools and wood and mugs and plates
and books and pens and paper
and forks and spoons
and a sweetheart’s hand.
They do not close as once they did,
so tightly that they could catch
my breath on winter days,
and when now they speak
in gesture they are
slow, brutish, leaving most
to context and implication.
And, of course, the pain they carry, that is new as well,
the constant reminder of dull aches,
the sharp-edged recriminations of grip and release.
I have always seen them, in many ways, as extensions of me,
strong and supple, quietly expressive,
nimble in deed and thought, switching with ease
from fountain pen
to computer keys,
from kitchen knife
to garden tool,
from dovetail jig
to a viola’s strings
to my true love’s hair.
This still is true, I suppose, as they and I both are
a good bit older, a dash more tired,
content to spend time in restful contemplation.
We still do all the things we used to, only
with a mindfulness that comes from
a slow paring down of life from what we need
to what we desire
to do, to feel, to create.
Perhaps I do not recognize them
because I do not know who I am,
in this time.
Perhaps they are teaching me.
Clever hands.
Let’s learn together.
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 