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Hands
Once teaching English in Ivory Coast you gave the ritual handshake all around and someone teased the texture of your palms: “Mais Monsieur, vous n’avez jamais cultivé la terre.” And not until walking the road from Tiebissou, laterite caking the skin, did you contemplate the rain-forgotten soil or the emptiness of your hands. When we met on the abused asphalt of Sheridan Square, our hands lost altitude, our eyes gripped hungrily to eyes. I said, “I’m Handy’s boy.” Already touched and tattooed. My blood is southern laterite, my cradle Connecticut, and my skin the color you’ve kissed before. Once rhyming English in Massachusetts, teaching metaphor and meter, I heard the veiled dissension: “But Sir, you have never worked the land.” Yet even then, trailing the Berkshires, my legs brittle twigs among the trees, did my fingers cup on pine cones and the fixed solitude of winter. Here in the fist of New York City elbowing the Atlantic, or in Dakar, jagged peninsula begging the geography, these instruments of embrace between us reach and reel and roll and reap— these calluses are none but our own.