Vox Populi
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Doug Anderson: I Gave my Hands the Day Off
I gave my hands the day off
and they couldn’t wait
to get out of the house,
heard the door slam behind them.
Right went to the bookstore,
left to the fair where it became
webbed with cotton candy.
The right got lost in a volume
of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
and is twitching to write something.
So much better for them
to be away for the day.
How much mischief they would find
at home where their owner,
heart heavy as a bull’s,
longs to cup breasts and buttocks
or trace the gentle curve of a neck.
He sits in his chair and plots outrage,
invents a project for each finger.
Or gives into despair and wants
a burning star to crucify each palm.
—
Copyright 2015 Doug Anderson
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Beautiful, intendedly contradictory proof that you didn’t give them the day off at all! And this cupping of breasts and the aerial limning of, the tracery of buttocks and the neck (and ensellure and arches and shoulders and…): Shouldn’t all of us be more alert to finding that in our lives, equally enlivening another human with our actions? I’ve been delinquent in that for so long. Thank you, Doug, for providing resonance for me, in both my life and poetry, with those lines. The day: We don’t need one off. We need the great poets to instruct us…all…in what goes into the existential gumbo of it…how it might occur with greater incidence in our world.
When we touch a woman’s body we are drawing it, putting it into visceral space, for the delight of both involved… Purest benefaction in this atmosphere.
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A wonderful poem, Doug– such a lovely weft of humor and pathos….I sometimes feel the need to give the mind, ever dreaming up disaster scenarios, a month off…xxj
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