The Biscuit Joint: Poems

Ode to My Hands

39 ODE TO MY HANDS How about a quote, says our university’s media rep, who’s writing a piece on Barbara, so I say I married Barbara because I couldn’t keep my hands off her, and the media rep says, Great! and then calls back an hour later to say, Sorry, the boss says no, and when I ask why, she says it’s the hands, and when somebody says that to you, you can’t help looking at your hands and saying, Boys, it’s not your fault. Think of everything you have done: you have changed my sons’ diapers, and, as he lay dying, my father’s as well. You have made countless small meals for those sons and their friends as well as an equal number of pedestrian and occasionally fine ones for the wife who was the nominal topic of this poem until you displaced her and, when that wife has been out of town, for male friends for whom I’ve fried, baked, and barbecued and with whom I’ve drunk all day on my deck, during which time you turned ribs on the grill as well as sausage links and chicken and lifted tots of whiskey and bottles of beer to your confederates in bodily pleasure, my lips, and put on music and mopped up messes and showed those friends to their cars and, when they have been too drunk, to bed. You have lit both firecrackers and fine cigars. You have tortured successively the clarinet, the trumpet, the piano, and now the guitar, the right hand plucking one string as the left presses the string either above or below and then goes lower or higher as the right does the opposite and another false note is struck, though a new one this time. You have sawed wood, hammered nails, changed flats, and felt fire running through you that time I changed the electrical outlet in the kitchen and forgot to cut the power. You bear scars: a nick on the left index finger 40 from a dropped pop bottle, a monkey bite on the right thumb, and, next to it, an L-shaped reminder of a chemistry experiment gone wrong. You have fired rifles, shotguns, and both types of pistol. You have played sports, even though you dropped more balls than you caught, and buried the bodies of pets beloved and despised. To my shame, though not yours, at parties you have caressed the bottoms of friends’ wives who, to their credit, turned in surprise and, on seeing it was me, smiled indulgently and went back to their conversations instead of telling their husbands, who would have beaten me with their own hands. Barbara herself has spoken of you and, indeed, to you, praising you in terms beyond your merit. For you are not lovely: you are too small for someone my size, and your fingers are more like sausages than the long and tapered fingers of pianists and cardiothoracic surgeons. When the media rep calls to ask if it’s okay to say “couldn’t live without Barbara” instead of “couldn’t keep my hands off her,” I can’t help saying, Yeah, but that’s the kind of thing that sounds best if you say it with a fakey European accent, and then I look at you guys again. I haven’t even gotten to the things to which you give most of your time: brushing, flossing, turning pages, and scratching your best friends, my other body parts. When I finish writing about you, you’ll lie quietly in your favorite resting place, my lap, and when I close you, you’ll open again, as though ready to speak. ...