Seven Hands

Cole Swensen

THE HISTORY OF THE HAND

Once.                    you said turning

is still saying

such theories: star bomb bird and so on equally

convinced, we started once

to hold

used to mean to anoint before it meant

to bless

or lessen

or whiten the sky

“Hands appear in the earliest” (framed, sized)

overflowing the margins. The man

born with two left hands was born a grown man.

The man born with his hands full of hands later died.

There’s no mystery to this. You listened, looking down,

counting, thinking, And?

Assyrian hands were carved of stone.

Egyptian hands were the point of the tale.

The Gothic hand, like no other, launched. That of the Renaissance,

                  early and late,

fragile and breaks, a wave on light.

Ghirlandaio had hands of willow, while

every hand that Dürer ever drew thrived.

Most hands are startlingly small, like eyes.

THE HAND THAT

The hand that thinks, that lies inside, that lines

the moving hand; the ventricles of the thinking hand and what it thinks

and what it sees (because it does

Thinks: “When you tie a knot

you can utterly forget, you can think

(can be thinking

of something else at the time) that the muscle is itself memory

lives again a folded time alive I tie.

 I thought nothing of it

then.      Type.    Watch              what

lives without you. To have harbored

as mutiny that doesn’t even bother                 The hand

was            (once an)            animal, a prior

Architecture: Archlessly, each one.

There’s nothing in the frame.

       There’s an empty frame on the wall.

I love you more                 than that I keep thinking that

                     the hand is sky

                     though I’m not yet

                     sure exactly how.

THE HAND AS

The hand began an animal and from thereon did

some guile that soft

plural kite

in

flock

did

herd

who thus                   shard

       comes to mind first                 I mean, note

the exploded

stasis

used to mean star

or stop

in every native language

you hold it up. Stark. Startle. Arp.            When you hold up your hand

and the world stops

and you find yourself looking at the back of your hand,

which, the longer you look at it, looks starved.

THE HAND DEFINED: I

How is the We define the Where begin? an elbowful of muscle

fine as an inner ear

Those who say the definition of the hand begins in the shoulder say those who say (they abbreviate) (mya): between 3.9 and 4.2 Million Years Ago, Australopithecus anamemsis: To find. Fossils of the hands and feet are so much rarer than those of skulls. Refined. We’re back to the inner ear. To hold onto earth hearing

with the fingertips all those singly

millions of                           early braille, caressing a                      an

armful of earth in falling

and is still falling

the entire

structure of the back and shoulder

and enormous parts of the brain.

FAN

Species of when, that outward

drift, a piano under every lens.

     It was a compliment:

the hands of a surgeon or of a violin.

It was hot that summer                       and every day thereafter

Slipped through the trees. The vanes of a fan

are often made from

bone she said I own this one

  of painted air               of where

was it painted where air spears

and folds like ribs turned to leaves

turned to sand.              :the opposite of a fist

is these hands gone up before a face. Summer gate. Sun made of gave.

HELD

The cup the hand becomes

a bell

is first a shape, then there’s something

soft in your hand. The hand is a curved

thing. The held being

a function of the inverted arch

and ease of vault

when looking up, an immense

Walk backward from here to the sea.

across the street

the hand always curves

in the holding. The held, its own being

a mollusk shell

all phalanges and grippage

Was now surrounds, what might

be the connection between tool use, language,

and the spiral gene determining

twenty-one muscles set out to sea

on a perfectly lovely day                    the human hand fits

the human waist just above the hip like, you might say, a glove.

GRASP

As the hand carved first         its arc         in air

                  a

                  corresponding

                  sweep through the

brain

was made aviary spaces something like

airplane hangars in their relative dimensions

and thus the impression of standing

under a sky that you can see.         And the supple wrist, as it turned,

turned too in the mind and acquired

All we can do, say, with the thumb and a single finger was once.

What

can you remember doing first thing this morning among

answers and the liquid trees

              Who picked this

              fruit of         just

the key in the door got there by itself. The lights just grew on the

trees.