ANATOMY
The Hand
This is me. Talking.
This is me. Holding up my hand
and looking deep into it.
This is me. Closing my eyes and
listening to the voices speaking within.
Is anyone listening?
Am I listening?
My hand swims through the quick
water of daylight, through the slow
water of the night.
My hand burns during the day and
curls into brown smoke.
My hand burns at night and
crackles with electricity.
It jumps when anyone walks past.
It gasps and swallows short
breaths and stumbles over its broken teeth
when anyone asks it a question.
Is anyone listening?
Am I even listening?
I do not want to listen.
I do not want to sit and wait,
holding my hand in my hand
like a woman in the cold, a woman in the
cold and the dark cradling a dead child,
like a woman cradling nothing.
I hear the hand all day.
I hear it whispering behind walls.
Behind thin doors.
I hear it in my dreams. In my desire.
My lust is filled with the dark
blood of my hand, the dark light
that pulls, that calls, pulls
like a heavy rope at my heart.
I look at my hand and see
the scars of fires and knives.
I look at my hand and see
the calluses of stones and sticks.
I look at my hand and hear
the slow bending of bone, the curling
tongue of tissue and vein as the old words of my heart
close upon themselves like a leaf,
like the leaves of plants in dry lands
desperate to preserve the little that
remains in their veins.
I hear my hand call out and I turn my back.
I turn away from the sight of its large fingers
curled around the hole in my back,
its hard skin closing tightly like a
scar over the site of so many scalpels,
the loss of so many shoes.
The absence of feeling. Of so many feelings.
The feeling of being me, when I am so
few other things too.
This is me. Talking.
Me talking to me.
Me not talking to the one who really exists.
Who is at the still centre of the storm.
Who I have never seen. Only smelt.
The smell of lost flowers.
The smell of lost hair.
Eyes that opened once, flashed
like water under the sun,
spontaneously, and then were gone.
Beneath the black rock of fear.
This is me. Talking.
Is anyone listening?
Me talking. Because I cannot do
anything else.
Cannot run, jump, climb, skip,
hurry, walk to the end of the sky.
Barely stand without falling over.
Because it is only my hand that
holds me up, that holds me onto
the narrow path, where there are no handholds,
only deep and empty falling.
But the hand is mortal.
The hand is not God.
Nothing comes without a price.
So it must burn.
It must suffer for justifying me.
Am I listening?
Is anyone listening?
How much longer before my hand gives up?
Gives up talking, holding
on through the smoke and the flames,
hoping to hear an answer of water.
Gives up and closes
the windows to its salvation.
The Foot
My foot is a hole.
A stone.
A black stone.
A hole made by the stone
before the hole was made.
A hole that the stone cannot get out of,
no matter how black, and blacker still,
its skin goes —
Until its skin begins to crack, and
pieces flake off.
Chunks of rock falling into
the black hole that the foot grows
beneath its shadow.
My foot is a stone.
Underneath the stone is a hole
that spreads and shrinks and
spreads again as the wind blows.
The hole is called desire.
And loss.
And rot.
It smells like words left a long time
in the crevice between two teeth.
Like words that have been closed up
too long in the dark pit of the mouth.
Sweating all night. And sleepless
in the day.
My foot is a hole made by a shard
of memory.
It walked through black mud
one morning on the edge of a brown lake,
where the birds waded deep up to their cries,
up to their blue wings.
It walked through the black mud and
into the lake.
And the water was not cold,
the foot said.
Come in, the foot said. The water is warm.
Look.
And it bent and scooped up the old skin
from off the surface of the lake and
threw it up into the air.
And the flakes of water flew.
And the flakes of water fell.
And the foot came up out of the water
and it was red.
It was red where the flakes of water
had fallen upon it and cut it —
called out to it its new name.
Its new name was loss.
And rot.
And desire.
My foot is a punishment for having eyes.
A reward for perceiving.
My foot remembers the brown lake
always, and longs to return
to the warm water, to the impenetrable depths,
lurking with the voices of fishes.
It remembers the brown lake
with its long waving hair and its green eyes,
and it wants to laugh again, loudly,
the way the long grass does.
It wants to laugh again.
But there is a hole.
There is the hole made by the red stone
that does not heal. Ever.
The hole that never closes over.
Even when it seems to.
I hold my foot in my hand every night,
spit onto it.
I spit into its red hole and
mix the spit with sand and honey,
and pack it full. I pack the hole full
every night, and when I go to sleep
I dream that the hole is growing a skin over it.
That a wide bridge is falling out of the sky,
and that it lands on my foot,
and that it covers the deep distance
between the edges of the red hole.
My foot imagines that it has something to say.
It pretends that everyone —
including the fishes in the brown lake and
the birds in the air and the stones, too,
in the black desert —
that everyone wants to hear what it has to say.
That it has a message.
But it is not a particularly interesting story.
To be honest,
it has all been said before.
The Foot (the other one)
My other foot is stupid.
And small.
And not worth talking about.
The Shoulder
Fire most times.
And ice the others.
Fire when the ice has melted,
and standing is impossible.
Fire when the wind blows the night over,
when the invisible river running through the night
runs out of breath.
Fire most times.
And others a blade
like a butcher's,
a hammer, a chisel — bone and tissue
separating every day and returning
with every step.
The Foot Re-Visited
My other foot is second in-line.
It is not the cause, but the effect.
It is not the action,
but the echo that remains and waits
long after the air has returned
to stillness.
My other foot is a fish
without a backbone.
It is a pale creature from the bottom of the sea.
A desire without a shell.
Eyeless and slow.
It hears everything around it —
the whisperings and the giggles, the loud staring and
the soft pity of the eyes.
It hears everything,
but cannot see any of it.
It knows that the bottom of the sea
is not the same as the surface,
that the darkness is not the same as sunlight.
But it is unable to choose.
It's choice has already been made.
Long before the land struggled out of the water.
It can only respond.
It is a response.
But (oh!)
how it longs to be the action.
The Wrist
My wrist, the right one,
is a wrench.
My wrist, not the left, is rust.
It is red metal amongst stone.
It is brittle tin. It is clanking iron.
My wrist is unsettled.
It does not join or turn or fold or meet.
It grinds, stone against stone, mid-day
sunlight against old iron.
Cold night against cold stars.
It is a sharp moon. A blunt moon.
Made blunt on the blade of a hill.
The wrist, my wrist, my right,
is all that holds me up.
Keeps me perpendicular
to the black grave.
Anatomy was written during a residency at the Caversham Centre for Writers and Artists in January 2008.
soli deo gloria
