---

Look at Your Hands

 

Look at your hands. What do you see?

Make something from that.

 

Those were the simple instructions.

So I followed: two dried pinpricks of

blood from hangnails I worried, dog hair,

a scab that’s taking its own sweet

time healing, the gold band from

my sweetest friend, and blue rivers of

vein that render my hands topographic.

 

Look at your hands.

What do you see?

What in the world can you make from that?

 

Maybe a corny poem about how I long

longed to possess my father’s hands.

But I’ve come to see I have my own.

Twin fields formed from the plows I’ve chosen

and the particular affections that flow

from my heart down their blue rivers,

then back upstream.

 

— John Blase