 | The Sunday Poem: The Man With Wooden HandsJune 18th, 2006 |
This was a man with wooden hands. He danced to heavy beats
but in the silence of his closet Mussorgsky bellowed.
He greeted with an hidalgo turn of wrist, and breathed the country,
inhaling its people and brushing the industries off his upper lip
like the foam from stiff beer. The kind of man
Who searched for the foundation stone of mountains.
His soul was made of cambric, but his mind of silk.
Champagne in the evenings and daily food from stalls
With ants crawling over the ice and meat bubbling in the air.
His wife had cheeks like porcelain, that flushed
when filth came near, but he lived with women whose sweat
In the huts he helped build crept rank and sweet through men.
“These are our bodies,” he would say of the musician’s guitars.
“These are our immortal souls,” he cried to the mosquitoes
that drank his blood at every possible turn. He ended his days
shriven and shriveled in a wicker rocker, porched and netted
by his son, watching grands play in white on the shaved-head lawn.
His footprint coated mound grave seemed to shake during storms.
Ah, the passage of years. His children wear gloves. And I
fear to tread by the cemeteries of our mountains, for pagan
hands may catch me, and hold me, and I would not struggle.
I suppose it’s a poem about refinement across successive generations, about crudity giving way to bloodlessness. But mostly it was about my maternal grandfather.
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