Hands
A poem
Never marry a left-handed man
My grandmother said, feigning silliness, barbed and within
my grandfather’s hearing like the mailbox being filled
Everyday same time
Just outside enough
to be ignored but expected.
She cut him when she could,
And shamed him for his defenses
Which could never match her
half-century double blade.
He delivered her pills at 8 o’clock
And she kissed him as eighty-year-olds do
From dusty blankets on warped wood floors
That held the piles and mites
of catalogued blame.
No oil. No money.
The only marriage I saw up close was theirs:
Ripping the roots out of drought-dry dirt
And moving them six inches away
Day after day
“Transplanting” she called it
Unwatched they could be tender
Or atomic, convulsing dishes,
she wandering through town lost and demented
To spite him
He sold land out from under her
In the tumult of her madnesses
Which he denied then blamed her for
She refused to get dressed after that
I held her dying in my hands
The psychiatric hospital floors stuck to me,
a geriatric chemical wetness;
Her roommate stole her socks,
a nearby woman hooted rhythmically for hours
Grandmother begged for more blankets,
sweating and starving slower than time,
A square sponge of syrup her only food
We wedged in her mouth with a stick
She, half immobile and calling out in fear,
then for Mama, Daddy
I remember her absence in jolts;
She never met this man
who found me —
And she is nowhere I can take him.
A pink flower blooms through his wood fence,
facing the driveway as I arrive,
He plants white vincas that withstand the heat
He waters the ground on a mental timer
Like she did
For me he strings together far-apart stars
Even on nights I sleep alone
And he is far away:
This quiet left-handed man
