Long Hand
Aug 26 2010


He told me he wrote long hand,
no keyboard, no dictation.
I imagined block letters, black ink, blank paper
both sides, nothing wasted.
He folded his hands awkwardly,
and I’m sure I made him self-conscious, watching —
the thickly gnarled fingers
callused skin,
hands as big as catchers’ mitts.
Well-worn leather
supple, strong.

I had never seen an author
with such massive hands.
They should have been mucking-out barns
wrapped around hammers
tearing things apart.
Instead, I pictured a pen
swallowed in his grasp,
a brittle twig
accidentally snapping.
Hands that had lived
another life,
working hands
enabling him
to write.

Power restrained
impresses me more than cheap displays of strength
— strongmen flexing, heaving weights,
Goliath taunting David.
I find myself imagining those giant hands
as big and thick as bear paws
cradling a baby girl,
and she would disappear
and the crying stop
and her eyes lock on to his,
bright with wonder.

He writes with the lightest touch
kinetic, deft, insightful,
and I would love to see him at work.
To see these hands
grasp the pen precisely,
ink flow smoothly
onto thick white paper,
words emerge
as if channelling some inner voice.
To see these hands,
unselfconscious
full of purpose.

How the hands of Samson
in the arms of Delilah
become gentle and sure.




I try hard to follow the cardinal rule of poetry: that less is more. Which not only means trusting the reader, and not only means ruthlessly cutting adverbs and adjectives (adverbs especially!), but also means avoiding big words. Because big esoteric arcane words stop the reader in her tracks, require too much processing, and make the poetry seem formal and inaccessible instead of conversational and welcoming. Which means I resisted the temptation of “brobdingnagian” hands. And also that I forced myself to throw out this opening rhyme, which was probably more about showing off my cleverness than good communication:

He told me he wrote long hand,
no keyboard, no amanuensis.
I imagined block letters, black ink, blank paper
both sides, palimpsest.

Anyway, the sequence “dictation”... “paper" ...“wasted” flows better, and says the same.

We think we can judge people by their hands: the firm handshake of the “manly” man, warm and dry; the big competent hands of the working man, that seem to proclaim competence and integrity; the aesthete’s long thin fingers, which feel like a damp fish in yours. I’ve always been very self-conscious about mine. I have Reynaud’s Syndrome, which means they’re often cold as a corpse, and mottled blue, red, and white. But they’re also large (relatively, that is) and strong and callused from hard labour (well, from years of paddling, actually) . A patient commented once how unusual this was for a doctor, which caught me off guard: I’d always been embarrassed by my hands (especially since I made my living touching people in very private and intimate ways), and never recognized that they were hands that had worked, and been worked over. How nice to feel differently about myself – for once, anyway!

The poem actually began with either a radio interview, or a magazine article (can’t quite remember). Anyway, the author who was the subject of the piece was introduced this way: how his hands struck the interviewer, how incongruous and telling they were. I immediately thought there was a poem here, and off I went. So it’s not about me at all (especially the “kinetic, deft, insightful” part, which would be awfully presumptuous if I was talking about me!) But I think it does make the point that the best “art” is informed by real life; that the best poetry is not some rarefied aesthetic exercise, but is rooted in personal experience and hard reality; and that poets rarely fit the effete, limp-wristed stereotype.