Institute for the Hand

It feels like jail, or church:

each of us nursing a private pain,

head down, or gazing into space,

inwardly cursing when the search

for gratitude things aren't worse

steps childishly backward again.

Most of us misstepped

to get here: the architect who tripped

on a railing four inches high, landing

on the hand that was his career,

and tumbling through the universe

(as in the universal nightmare)

even in his daydreams now,

will fall until his soul's rebuilt;

the first-time mother, a pianist,

who in slipping on the ice had broken

the baby's fall with her own wrist,

and is consumed by guilt

for daring to mourn it. Yet

what Being begins to care? White-

pawed in outsized plaster, she

suspects that something in us shapes

God in our image. Bad news if we

are a race evolved from apes.

A hit-and-run case, brute

injustice on a motorbike

has brought that old man and his wife

(whose hands flew to their faces) here

to undo the crash three times a week

for the worst part of the winter.

He's mostly cured, I've guessed

from his newly-waxed moustache, a touch

unthinkable to the depressed;

but her index finger's locked in that same

wire gizmo, pointing outward as if

one of us is to blame.

I look away and pluck

with my good hand a magazine

from the table. What if I stumble on

an exercise routine, or a scene

of skiers afloat on flawless luck?

(Skiing: that's what did me in.)

Too risky. I scan my purse

instead for Edgar Allan Poe,

and pry open with my teeth a coffin

for reading glasses-the latest blow

in a series of indignities

that wound my vanity alone,

yet seem part of some grand

conspiracy, as if they're meant.

In the mystery I turn to, a girl

has been throttled, it appears, by a hand

too mammoth to be human, an agent

that may be diabolical

or, as Dupin divines, a wild

ex-con who's an orangutang.

A beast with less sense than a child

of motive, or of right and wrong,

whose ideal state is to be jailed,

whose innocence we can't forgive for long.