Dear Friend,

Now and then, I’m going to repeat myself. I will bounce echoes of past letters off the walls of my cavernous mind and onto this digital page. I will follow patterns and routines, retrace my steps. I will revisit poems, songs, artworks because they matter to me, or out of habit, and then they will open up other ideas in the folds of their mysteries, enriching me again.

One morning last week (two, three weeks ago? COVID time?) I began the day by listening to one of my favorite podcaster-poet-philosopher, Pádraig Ó Tuama, read and ruminate on the poem “Wishing Well” by Gregory Pardlo (repeat from letter No. 1). The poem’s narrator, distant and distracted in his life, encounters a stranger in front of a museum fountain, an ersatz wishing well, and experiences an unexpectedly intimate interaction. The intimacy hinges on the two men holding hands, sharing a momentary ceremony of transformation.

[...] his rough hand
in mine inflates like a blood pressure cuff and I
squeeze back as if we are about to step together
from the sill of all resentment and timeless
toward the dreamsource of un-needing [...]

The imagined sensation of holding a stranger’s hand, or a familiar’s strange hand, or the strangeness of touching anyone at all other than my immediate family, floored me. I’m not a person who often seeks out or is comfortable with the physical closeness of others, but this ghostly feeling of your hand in mine is haunting, desirable and unsettling. Considering this poem, I wrote about the holding of hands in my sketchbook that morning (and here transcribe with some annotation):

I want to hold your hand. [Ugh, that lesser Beatles tune interrupts my reverie – you too?]
(after Gregory Pardlo)
what would it feel like?
touch of death [a bit melodramatic, but the fear of virus transmission by touch in the early pandemic was palpable]
damp, warm/cool [when hands are held for a long time, or whenever I hold my 5-year-old’s hand]
rough hewn [my hands have been covered in knicks and cuts, dried out and coarse as a result of weeks of working on a home renovation project]
calloused fingertips [I play guitar daily – my callouses chart my discipline]
you can’t unlock the phone [for me, this is a common annoyance of the fingerprint sensor]
or soft leather by years
would I be ashamed of my own? [cf. cut-up hands and calloused fingers]
we join a circle for strength [here I’m thinking about the joining of hands in certain religious communities and practices, which I grew up experiencing – and awkward team building exercises]
I collapse, you stumble
hands tighten, blood pulses [I’m riffing on Pardlo’s image of the blood pressure cuff]
and I am dizzy
I want to hold your hand
how would I even ask it? [this question is pivotal – asked another way: when we ever get to the other side of this pandemic, how will re-engage with each other?]
I would trade this slow death 
for the final blow of your
touch, then sleep, dream
awake on the other side [okay, more overwrought melodrama, but I’m thinking about this pandemic year of trade-offs – isolation and safety at the expense of physical and emotional connection with others]

Remember: early last year, in the delirious precursor to the pandemic lockdown, physical touch was the first thing we lost. We pulled our hands back, shoved them in pockets, nodded awkwardly in mutual understanding, then reached for hand sanitizer, or watched videos about how to scrub our hands. People wrote social media posts about the death of the handshake. We speculated about bumping elbows or tapping each other’s feet. For one brief moment that all seemed amusing, a bearable sacrifice to get us through a few weeks of inconvenience. If only.

That same morning, I followed Pardlo’s poem with “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt” by Ross Gay, which is a rumination on hands and fingers and their practices. Gay is a poet who celebrates the intimacy of everyday life – to button and unbutton a shirt is to explore our relationship to the world, our loved ones, ourselves.

[...]
two maybe three
times a day
some days
I have the distinct pleasure
of slowly untethering
the one side
from the other
which is like unbuckling
a stack of vertebrae
with delicacy
for I must only use
the tips
of my fingers
with which I will
one day close
my mother’s eyes
this is as delicate
as we can be
in this life
practicing
like this
[...]

As always, thanks for reading.

With hands, 

Jeremy