 |
| Sistine Chapel by Michaelangelo |
A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.
Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.
A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body.
Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink.
The maple's green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.
A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.
Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.
Response: I understood that this poem is an image based description of hands, or what hands are not,
up until the fourth stanza, where it says "maple's green hands". I think now that Hirshfield is talking
about leaves. But then she goes back to the last 2 lines which evoke an image of a church choir
with worshipers and their hands receiving God. I like the beginning of this poem, and seeing the
hands described as tasks and that they are not these tasks, they are something else. I don't understand
where it went in the end. I like the list form, it is not monotonous, the language is engaging.
