Hands: A Fairy Tale

Published in Summer Issue of Anything, Anymore, Anywhere

Once there was a right-handed poet. From her favored fingers flowed nimble arabesques, dexterous lyrics, puzzles without solutions and metaphors without conclusions.

One hand strong
the other
atrophied

One day the woman felt a tremendous pain in her pampered hand. She wrapped it, she iced it. The arabesques unraveled. The questions ached at her fingertips but could not be written.

My medium
my channel--
don’t leave me now!

She went to an Eastern doctor, a Western one. Finally a man set down his eyeglasses: “Given the deterioration of the bone fragments, your hand has been broken for at least 15 years.”

Could I have ignored
my own injuries so long?
Little bones, grinding

After the operation, the poet was no longer nimble, dexterous or elegant. Her right hand, bones fused together like a paddle, could no longer ask questions. The fingers of her left hand were clumsy, the wrist unresponsive. The poem juvenile. She threw it away.

But the abandoned hand grew stronger, less afraid. Until one day she sat at the keyboard and accepted the poetry of her neglected fingers:

The metaphors had conclusions.
The lyrics had codas.
The puzzles had solutions.

Right-handed poet
writes with left hand
--the questions are answered.