Hand
After Wallace Stevens
My body and your body and our body.
The two-fingered hand.
She never follows the four winds,
only the fifth—the cyclone—
wind of the fist.
Tracer of love in the dust.
Spike in the tree.
Bringer of madness.
Two hands interlace, not ours.
It is a charcoal of my other hands.
The hand fumbles at cats cradle in sunlight:
it takes far longer
when there are eyes involved.
Key to the dialect of midnight:
the vowels are always shaped
like fingers.
Even borderlines hold their breath
at the sound of those hand-shadows
parting the air.
Morning seeped in under the door
as blue fog. Four hands
cradled the steam above one clay mug.
Marionettes danced
The Firebird across the stage as though their souls had fingers.
Not painting, but the act of painting:
the presence of the absent hand.
How is the piano without hands
unlike a painting without speech?
With a wave of the leader’s hand,
hundreds were lost.
One glimpse of the cosmos is forever.
When read like braille,
the stars sizzle in the hand.
© 2006 Katherine Williams
Artist Kat Hastie and the author were paired for a curious ekphrastic challenge by City Gallery in 2010, for an exhibit of paintings created in response to poems. Kat chose “Hand” from Williams’s sample, and composed a series of about sixty abstract works on boards salvaged from a dilapidated blue Sea Island shed.
“Hand” first appeared in Southern Poetry Anthology: South Carolina, William Wright and Stephen Gardner, Eds., Houston: Texas Review Press (2007). The poem also appears in Charleston Today (2010). [get pdf 2.8MB]
A Kat Hastie Piece Based on a Poem by Katherine Williams (detail), mixed media 10”x12” (2010)