Hand Jibes

painting by Nicolas De Largilliere.

Hand Jibes

“People say I have the most beautiful hands,”

--Donald J. Trump

There is a cave deep in the Sahara

where 10,000 years ago primitive men

traced their hands on the wall--

                interspersed with tiny hand prints, even

                smaller than an infant’s hands, where

                upon investigation, those prints turned

                out to be the forefeet of the desert monitor

                lizard, conjuring mystery & wonder.

Makes me think about dolphins,

         who have large brains, with intelligence

                     and intellectual capacity close to our own,

                               but possessing no hands, so they do not

                                         have the ability to either build or destroy

                               things--they just pass through their

                      environment without changing it. Our opposable

          thumbs give us the opportunity to create

and utilize tools, whereby the planet is forever altered.

When studying anatomy for Art,

it is the hands that are the most

difficult to draw or sculpt. I loved

the sensitivity used in the movie

BEN HUR, where only the hands

of Jesus were photographed handing

a cup of water to Judah as he was

marched in chains to the Roman galleys.

Hands as metaphors & indicators dominate so much of our

communicative phrasing, from hand-me-down genetics

                   to surrendering with our hands up,

                   to a round of audience applause,

                   to points of laterality,

                   to rotating indicators on time pieces,

                   to our individualistic patterns of cursive,

                   to creating meals from scratch,

                   to cards held by players,

                   to using fists for defense or assault,

                   to grasping & shaking as a greeting,

                   to asking for a pledge to wed,

                   to a deftness & expertise in performing tasks,

                   to being a specific kind of laborer,

                   to being close by for support,

                   to cajole or force another’s action,

                   to achieve overwhelmingly,

                   to flail in the air out of hopelessness,

                   to wring & twitch out of desperation, or

                   to pray & supplicate. 

Without hands we would

have no art, skyscrapers or

machines; quite the quandary.

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over at dVerse Poets Pub