I shift my left hand into the sunlight on
our breakfast table and take a minute to observe
up close and intentional its fleshy shape,
skin stretched over bones thin as a bird’s.
It looks claw-like, primitive. My gold
wedding band is permanent, caught on
my ring finger by its knotty knuckle.
I’m pleased that I’m finding words
to tell you how the fingers still reach for
the railing up the stairs. Still grasp and
clutch. Still point.
There is damage—a scar on my thumb
from the feral cat and, on the back of my hand,
a dark smudge like a small map of Indonesia.
The right is the dexterous hand. The left
can neither write nor draw, yet it can still
lift a cup, pluck weeds, grasp a steering wheel,
signal right and left. Reach for yours.
Blood vessels still feed the flesh, mapping
their way like rivers under the surface.
As I describe all this to you, my dear,
using ordinary words that only grasp at reality,
I know they are never enough to tell
the whole of love. So now I pray for
phrases that are thick enough to tolerate
excavation, that tell in depth how
both our old hands, yours and mine, reach
and clasp each other in real time, real space.
How with fingers interlaced we still
discover warmth in the small cave
our hands create together.
Luci Shaw was born in London in 1928 and has lived in Australia and Canada. Author of over 35 books of poetry and nonfiction prose, since 1986 she has been Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver. In 2013 she received the 10th annual Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. Her most recent publications are The Thumbprint in the Clay (InterVarsity Press) and Sea Glass: New & Selected Poems (WordFarm), and Eye of the Beholder (Paraclete Press) is forthcoming in 2018. She lives in Bellingham, WA.