i hold my hand
and trace the soft mapping
of its threaded sinews
the small birdlike bones
the pale blue tracings of veins
so very near the finely wrinkled
summer-browned surface
i remember a photograph
my father took
of his hand
and i wondered at that time
about all
that his hand had known
now
in reading the topography
of my own hand
i can see the story
of the whole
in stuttering
and fragmented still shots
like so many conjoined cells
spread across the smooth space
of my entirety
14 comments:
Beautiful! Your posts are a pleasure to visit. :-)
Very fine steven, and I think I must be feeling mortality today.
I loved
'in stuttering
and fragmented still shots'.
not even reading the poem, just looking at the posted pics, it's already a beauty. i love the header pic. and the two on this post. you just captured them nicely.
have a great weekend!
JJRod'z
susannah thankyou! it gives me a great deal of pleasure assembling and sharing them. really it does! steven
titus that came out of a realization in the moment of writing that when i look back across my life the images that arise in sequence are almost all still shots contained in a moment of recollection. not movies. steven
hey jj thanks. i almost always have a camera with me and i take lots of photographs. one or two get saved after i look at them and some of those make it here. have a nice weekend yourself! steven
quite lovely illustration of our connectedness. i'll have to carry this with me into my work day.
xo
erin
Were you also surprised at the countenance of your own hand?
I glanced at mine the other day and wondered when someone began substituting my hand with my Mom's. :)
erin i'll be interested to see how this plays out in your work day! steven
hope, the process is so gradual and of so little consequence to me that i rarely stop and look and see what others see as a matter of course. yes it surprises me. i don't recognize my self very often. steven
Hands - oh my, such a subject! As I read, the image of an imagined Steven hand shifted into the photographs that Stieglitz took of O'Keefe's hands... amazing.
And that header photo is beyond stunning, I want to paint NOW!
valerianna - i'll be scouting around to find those pics. i may have seen them a long time ago when i had a book of stieglitz pics . . . where has that book gone?!!! the header photo is a sky a few days ago. the summer skies are always amazing. there are layers and tiny details. the colours are so dynamic. steven
I know there is one of those hand photos in the book called something like "The Art and Life of G.O." which I think is where I first saw it.
And I think winter/spring skies are most amazing here... but then again, maybe its because I am driving on a highway long distance two days a week and have more sky viewing than I do in the summer when I mostly see a small patch of it above the trees. I'll have to look more at the summer skies to see what I see.
A whole universe in a hand. A beautiful set of lines and connections you've written.
I see in my hands my aging maybe more than anywhere else.
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