by Angel Gonzales
After Kwame Dawes
Not so much the doing of things
but the hands of our making, their medicine,
the ordinary witness of grandma’s hands
padding and shaping sweetness, a cherishing,
if you will, of their inheritance, the bestowal
and succession, the intent of creation, the love
of softness, the finger-lickin’ stuff, and spit,
and cum, and then, the wiped and dried, leaving
behind residue of passion, a sticky remembrance
of a life lived, hand over hand, for the self
to honor and pray with when she walks
past the mirror and caves
to the sight of a landscape, the broad
shoulders, orbiting belly, man-hands
with sunken grooves as knuckles,
patches of black hair on stubs,
the startling girth of fingers and width
of palm, the fist, unable to disappear;
this is what one carries as a kind
of returning — the changing of a child’s diaper,
hands filled with mess, the rituals
of nurturing, the humbling warmth of a fat hand
or its swift correction, the dignity of holding,
the way we know how to feel through the dark.