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Title: The Hand
Author: Eunice Tietjens [
More Titles by Tietjens]
As you sit so, in the firelight, your hand is the color of
new bronze.
I cannot take my eyes from your hand;
In it, as in a microcosm, the vast and shadowy Orient
is made visible.
Who shall read me your hand?You are a large man, yet it is small and narrow, like the
hand of a woman and the paw of a chimpanzee.
It is supple and boneless as the hands wrought in pigment
by a fashionable portrait painter. The tapering
fingers bend backward.
Between them burns a scented cigarette. You poise it
with infinite daintiness, like a woman under the
eyes of her lover. The long line of your curved
nail is fastidiousness made flesh.
Very skilful is your hand.
With a tiny brush it can feather lines of ineffable suggestion,
glints of hidden beauty. With a little
tool it can carve strange dreams in ivory and
milky jade.
And cruel is your hand.
With the same cold daintiness and skill it can devise
exquisite tortures, eternities of incredible pain,
that Torquemada never glimpsed.
And voluptuous is your hand, nice in its sense of touch.
Delicately it can caress a quivering skin, softly it can
glide over golden thighs.... Bilitis had not
such long nails.
Who can read me your hand?
In the firelight the smoke curls up fantastically from
the cigarette between your fingers which are the
color of new bronze.
The room is full of strange shadows.
I am afraid of your hand....
[The end]
Eunice Tietjens's poem: Hand
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