Showing The Child I Have One Hand Poem by Richard Cole

Showing The Child I Have One Hand



I

Wonderingly, he
Touches the stump,
Gently maneuvers
The soft
Nubbin of a thumb,
Its baby
Nail.

This is hard, but I let him
Look as he wants, and he handles me
Kindly. I’m surprised
To remember the first time
I touched the thigh of a woman,
My heart racing, reaching
The wetness inside her.
With the pure gaze of an animal,
He examines it, me, for a moment
Longer, still curious, as children are,
And I hold my breath,
Waiting for what he will say.
He rubs his nose and looks up.
“Does it hurt? ” He asks.
“No, ” I tell him truthfully,
And he runs back to the other children,
Apparently satisfied.



II

I’ve been meaning to talk about this
Matter for some time now, but like most of us,
I suppose I take myself too seriously.
Perhaps it comes with the condition,
Feeling that your somehow inexpressively
Unique. So I want to tell you the story
Of Wittgenstein’s older brother,
The second son in that brilliantly
Self-conscious family, a concert pianist
Who lost his right hand in the war,
Though he later commissioned Ravel
For a slower music to be played
With the one hand.

I see him sitting by himself
in the family music room,
perhaps like the one designed
by his obsessively analytical brother,
deliberate in every detail. We’re in
Vienna now. It’s late afternoon.

“Do not be surprised, ” they had said.
His hand enters the music tentatively,
His one eye.
“Do not be surprised if repeatedly
You find yourself in your dreams
As if it were normal – we mean,
Before, ” and he thinks
This must be how the mind loses
Its body, how an empty room grows
Darker at the end of the day, the pale sky
Still shining at the windows, the brain
Sometimes taking years to decline
What is missing.

At the end of his sleeve, the phantom
Aches for an old perfection
That was never there,
Just as his last, inquiring note
Silvers into another you cannot hear.
You hear him now,
Touching the same chord
Over and over, searching
For the perfect end of the music
If only to show you that it doesn’t
Really matter after all,
And that it does.


III

I remember how the brush trembled
As my father painted
Signboards for his business,
The wet, black tip
Dancing lightly above the panel
Until at last it
Sank into a long, sure stroke,
The block letters emerging beautifully, each one
Balanced and square.
I once asked him – I was very small –
Why his hand shook when he painted.
For a moment he said nothing, vaguely
Irritated with the question, then said,
As if in compensation, “I’m afraid
Of making a mistake.”

I want to have children.
I want to teach them, the way
My father, whom I love, taught me.
I take one of them in my lap,
A son perhaps, discovering noses,
Glasses, rediscovering one day
How his father is different.
I want this child
Who will ask me questions,
Who will ask, “Does it hurt? ”
I could say something grave,
With implications
Left significantly unspoken,
But that’s not what he’s asking.
He’s a child,
And he simply needs to know
If his father is hurt,
And I need to tell him
in all honesty, no.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Topic(s) of this poem: body
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