Cole Swensen

[from Cole Swensen's The Book of a Hundred Hands, 2005]

The Hand Thinks

There's a hand that thinks, that lies inside, that lines the hand that
    moves

and it thinks: "While tying a knot, you can utterly forget, you can
    think
(can be thinking of something else at the time)
                                    that muscles have a memory all their own
that lives again a braided time
                                                 alive
                                                 I tie.

                                                 Watch
what without you lives. The life of fingers
harbors
mutiny that doesn't even bother.                    The hand, ever prior
avatar of architecture: archlessly, each one

is a frame.
There's an empty frame on the wall         and the hand is the sky
that opens the wall.

The Book of a Hundred Hands (Kuhl House Poets)