Hands take two

Remember how I have a thing about hands? I don't think I ever posted this bowl, but I made it in ceramics last spring and it was by far my favorite piece. I have made other hand things in ceramics.
This cover jar looks down right creepy. Or at least I was trying to make it look creepy. It was a wonky assignment to begin with.

Anyway, I am always drawing them and recently I found myself writing about them. In the margins of my notebook I found a description of my math teacher's hands. I took math last year at SFCC. This image of his hands lingered in my mind. Quick reflection showed that I have lingering images of several other sets of hands. So I started exploring more and thinking about my teachers in terms of their hands. If I was a poetry person, I would write a poem for each of them. But I'm not. So I have these almost poems... For your enjoyment.

My teacher’s hands are covered in chalk. Strong, thick brown fingers grip the tinny white chalk and make swift marks on the green board. Click-sch click-sch tap tap-sch, little white marks. Math for the liberal arts.

Magister has touched bright coral; living jewels under waters on the other side of the world. He has run his fingers over old tomes in a Catholic school, raising dust that smells like incense but is only academia. His silver hair slips through his fingers like so many other ancient, venerable things. He points at me and, in a voice like God’s, commands me to parse a verb. “Amo is the first person, singular, present tense, active voice, of the verb amo, amare, amavi, amatus; I love, to love, I have loved, Beloved.”

Dr. Peters could not understand why her fingers were so long. The only thing she wanted to do with them was hold a pen. All that length for no purpose but to curl around the narrow shaft of a writing tool seemed cumbersome. But she clutched at it and scribbled. Out poured all her thoughts and feelings, bursting at last through their imperfect channel. And her knuckles are swollen, as if they can no longer straighten and make her fingers long. A confused, knobby jumble.

The thumb-nail of Clair’s right hand has rested and struggled, wedged in the frog of her bow for so many years that it has flattened and concaved to fit the wooden nook. All her fingertips are shaggy and gray, like her. But they move so quickly, fitted to the strings, fingerboard and the shaft of the bow. Music, she says, is made by the tension and release of finer and finer muscles.