JOE ELLIOT

The Use Of Hands

1.

The sun was high and the square was dusty. A man was unloading box after box of identical brown shape and size from a flatbed truck. His hands, effacing themselves like money, could be used to discharge a pistol, present a flower, or lift a box of unknown content. He was doing his job, piling up the boxes as neatly as the cobblestones on which they safely rested had been laid a long time ago. Row after row he was making sure the phrase CAREFUL CONTENTS FRAGILE, stamped on each box and foreign to him, sat right side up and facing south. When the last one was in place, he climbed down from a ladder and, wiping his face with a bandanna, took a moment to look at the wall of boxes directly in front of your door. You were napping. The whole town was napping. He checked what was written on an creased scrap. Satisfied, he lashed the ladder to the bed and drove the truck out of the square.

 

2.

or by holding on to nothing,

by dropping everything they

are doing, they form fists,

drum fingertips, or fan wide

for direct contact as if

there were only the vanishing

silver zig-zagging path

of a quick fish thrown back

between this sense and that

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