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.

Notes:

This poem was previously published in Love’s Instruments (Tia Chucha Press, 1995) and is part of the portfolio “Melvin Dixon: I’ll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name.” © Melvin Dixon and used with permission of the author’s estate. You can read the rest of the portfolio in the April 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (April 2024)