whole hands

whole hands

there is a kind of thinking done only in the palms,

not the mind’s thin circling, its meticulous worry, but something older, blunt, and glad,

that wakes when the hands are given something real.the dough does not care what you meant to say.

it asks only that you press, and turn, and press, a conversation without language, without error, the body fluent in a tongue the head has forgotten.

how rarely now the world requires this of us.

we live so lightly on the surfaces of things, glass, and keys, and thin illuminated screens, that sometimes we forget we have a weight. but kneel in soil, or split a log along its grain, or coax a stubborn jar lid with both thumbs, and something in you answers like a dog that hears

its oldest name called out across a field. this is what the hands were made to know:

that matter yields.

that effort has a shape. that at the end of certain kinds of work your arms are tired, and something has been made.