Graf Week #1
Hand Assignment
They don't even look like mine anymore except the scar on the right ring finger. I put my hand through a pane of glass when I was 8. I got tired of the yelling and there just felt nothing other to do but to put my hand through glass to make it stop. It worked. The focus changed. I never bit my nails. My habit is picking at the cuticles. You can always tell how stressed I am by the number of Band-Aids adorning my hands. Only once in my life was there ten. Three is about as high as I let it go these days. My skin is older. There are maps on my hands now. The places that I've been are hieroglyphically displayed for any one that cares to read. Boulder left a scar from the odd shaped woodstove with the door that didn't open all of the way. There's a permanent mark left by the IV of the last surgery. She was in her first week of putting them in and was obviously very nervous. I let her do it anyway and just smiled as she dug around for the vein. Bless her heart; she cried more than I did. The fingers are long. I played the flute because someone said when I was young that I had a flutist's fingers. I haven't played for years but I'll bet these fingers still remember. I have that forever bump on the middle finger of my right hand. My fifth grade teacher told me that I'd be a writer because I had one. I remember that as I walked away from her desk I was thinking that I already was a writer. I said at the beginning of the graf that they don't look like mine anymore. What I realize by its end is that they look exactly like my life.
They don't even look like mine anymore except the scar on the right ring finger. I put my hand through a pane of glass when I was 8. I got tired of the yelling and there just felt nothing other to do but to put my hand through glass to make it stop. It worked. The focus changed. I never bit my nails. My habit is picking at the cuticles. You can always tell how stressed I am by the number of Band-Aids adorning my hands. Only once in my life was there ten. Three is about as high as I let it go these days. My skin is older. There are maps on my hands now. The places that I've been are hieroglyphically displayed for any one that cares to read. Boulder left a scar from the odd shaped woodstove with the door that didn't open all of the way. There's a permanent mark left by the IV of the last surgery. She was in her first week of putting them in and was obviously very nervous. I let her do it anyway and just smiled as she dug around for the vein. Bless her heart; she cried more than I did. The fingers are long. I played the flute because someone said when I was young that I had a flutist's fingers. I haven't played for years but I'll bet these fingers still remember. I have that forever bump on the middle finger of my right hand. My fifth grade teacher told me that I'd be a writer because I had one. I remember that as I walked away from her desk I was thinking that I already was a writer. I said at the beginning of the graf that they don't look like mine anymore. What I realize by its end is that they look exactly like my life.
posted by millay at 5:42 PM
1 Comments:
These are the three stillest pieces I've seen in a while: full of dim light, quiet, musing, memory (memory is the muses' handmaiden).
What tends to be hard with these pieces is giving shape to the details, but you take care of that, first and last, and are nimble enough to shift gears and offer a revision to your first thought. Slick!
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