These
Hands, If Not Gods
Haven't
they moved like rivers--
like
Glory, like light--
over
the seven days of your body?
And
wasn't that good?
Them
at your hips--
isn't
this what God felt when he pressed together
the
first Beloved: Everything.
Fever.
Vapor. Atman. Pulsus. Finally,
a
sin worth hurting for. Finally, a sweet, a
You
are mine.
It
is hard not to have faith in this:
from
the blue-brown clay of night
these
two potters crushed and smoothed you
into
being--grind, then curve--built your form up--
atlas
of bone, fields of muscle,
one
breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale,
both
Morning and Evening.
O,
the beautiful making they do--
of
trigger and carve, suffering and stars--
Aren't
they, too, the dark carpenters
of
your small church? Have they not burned
on
the altar of your belly, eaten the bread
of
your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
to
nectareous feast?
Haven't
they riveted your wrists, haven't they
had
you at your knees?
And
when these hands touched your throat,
showed
you how to take the apple and the rib,
how
to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all,
didn't
you sing out their ninety-nine names--
Zahir,
Aleph, Hands-time-seven,
Sphinx,
Leonids, locomotura,
Rubidium,
August, and September--
And
when you cried out, O, Prometheans,
didn't
they bring fire?
These
hands, if not gods, then why
when
you have come to me, and I have returned you
to
that from which you came--bright mud, mineral-salt--
why
then do you whisper O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.
My
hundred-handed one?
About
This Poem
"The images and hands of this poem
began building during Mass one Sunday. The reading was about the laying of
hands on someone, and I began thinking of how my own hands work upon a body.
How they do things both beautiful and awful--to gently trace a throat in one
moment, to hold it tightly in another--a type of sweet wreckery that makes me
feel godlike and helpless all at once."
--Natalie
Diaz