In Touch

March 3 2016

I am bad at keeping in touch.

Busy lives claim us

people drift away.

If all language is metaphor

then what could be more telling

than the human hand?

A lover’s private semaphore,

interrogating bodies

skin-to-skin

curve-on-curve.

The manly grip

as good as his word.

An infant in arms

in the moment of birth.

The dialect of touch,

from the beginning of life

to the rites of death.

Her naked remains

washed, and anointed

and laid to rest.

We stroke egos

prod memory

touch the heart.

Feel-out, slap-down

hold-off.

The privileged deaf

who talk with their hands.

Who can fill a room

with silent laughter,

ring tears

from fingers that flash

like quickly clacking tongues.

More often than not

it’s the women in our lives

who are good at reaching out.

Like lines of gravity

she holds us in her light,

minor planetoids

orbiting close.

The gentle pull

of a well-timed note,

a card, a call

a mention.

Sometimes, it’s almost telepathic,

the pressure of thought

rippling out in waves.

Like the other day

when you crossed my mind, and stayed.

When I could feel your hand

touch where I love to be touched;

as if distance

were immaterial,

time had come unstuck.

Nothing could be truer than the opening line. I think this applies to men far more than women. I know my mother was the glue that held extended family together. (I say “held” because, now over 90, she is increasingly limited by her slow cognitive decline.) And I know that married men (my two older brothers, for example) defer to their wives to maintain the social ties. So it’s bachelors like me who are most likely to drift off.

There are a lot of metaphors for touch in the English language. So it was fun to play around with this. Even neuroscience tells us how important hands are:  the homunculus – that miniature representation of the human body in the cerebral cortex – has disproportionately large fingers and hands. I would have liked to shoehorn that idea into the poem. Unfortunately, “homunculus” isn’t a very poetic word! And this would probably have been too self-indulgent a digression.

Physics is a recurring trope here. I think because the art of keeping in touch is like action at a distance:  like gravity, an invisible but persistent force. And this emphasizes the metaphorical power of the expression:  that is, you don’t have to literally touch in order to keep in touch.

I quite like quickly clacking tongues, if only because you can’t say it without actually feeling your tongue “clack”! But I think my favourite lines are A lover’s private semaphore,/ interrogating her body/ skin-to-skin. Because “interrogate” is a powerful word. And “semaphore” nicely conveys this idea of action at a distance, only to have “skin-to-skin” whipsaw the reader back into something that’s intensely and literally tactile.

The ending brings the poem back to the opening line:  from wandering off into generality, the focus narrows back in on the personal. There’s clearly a story here; but it’s left to the reader to write.