the Hands

the hands

I love these hands, designed by God to end my wrists. They are also the privileged ones that caress and play you. I stretch them before my eyes. I lift my little finger, a stem for the moon, a stalk completed by a calcium armor, I lift another finger, the middle, and with both in movement, on a wall suddenly inhabited I draw animals of vivid shadow for my children. They are amazed that black donkeys exist, capable of running over vertical plains, over the scored wall where only flies had reigned until today. They are happy to see hands holding as many beasts as Noah’s ark. With these hands I split the sweetest fig; I catch fish in the curve of their flashing arc. Sometimes my hands succeed in knitting themselves so tight that the corpse of a prayer scarcely fits between. Sometimes I throw them into space with such anger or joy that I cannot understand why they remain cloistered in the gesture; I really can’t understand why they don’t fly.

--from the heart if the flute; Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, translated by Laura Villasenor, 1979