Intermezzo

I’ve never known what to do with my hands. They crook and curl in ungirlish ways, such that I hide them in pictures. They darken at the knuckles where I used to bite them as a child. They dampen and dry and crack. The cuticle skin encroaches on the nail or peels away. Where I once ripped half my thumbnail off is a phantom itch, which I worry at with pencil lead or paper edges.

I look at the hands of other girls, other women—thin, graceful hands, with narrow nails, long nails, polished and unchipped, beringed, moisturized, youthful. Each is a mark of my own failing at girlhood. I spend $150 dollars on a nail set for a festival and waste the rest of day hating the color I’ve picked, the length, the shape, the foreign feeling.

No one holds my hand for very long. I had a terror for a long time of holding hands, or shaking them, fearing they would go clammy or oversoft. I had a teacher who stood at her doorway and shook every child’s hand, looking into your eyes with her own glass-cut gaze, the skin of her palms dry and pleasurably textured. I would hide in the hall until the bell had rang, perpetually late just to avoid such searing contact.

*

My fears make it difficult to live well. I cry without thinking, short bursts, like summer rain. I am moved by the smallest things.

I understand when I am making myself strange to people who would otherwise love me, or like me at least. I see their care and goodwill recede. I make the wrong expressions at rare times, and my sadness is always visible. It is exhausting to be around a person who is sad so often.

Cut-outs and herbs. How simple to recall a feeling from years ago.

I worry I have not led my life well. That those who professed esteem in me have realized it was misplaced.

*

In the morning I read, by chance, Frank O’Hara’s “River,” and all day the first lines marched through my head, an incantation, a ward against the dread of the day: Whole days would go by, and later their years,/ while I thought of nothing but its darkness/ drifting like a bridge against the sky. At work I whispered it to myself before meetings, on walks, and my heart hurt less, and things were easier.

*

Revisions

Rilke was wrong, beauty isn’t terror,

Beauty sustains, beauty is the small anchor

To which I lash myself in absence of my own footing;

What the eye pauses upon, what remains of dreams,

What follows the flashing light, what constitutes the afterimage;

If cold then the cold of a hand against my nape,

If dark then the dark of an eye against mine.