Handed, by Monty Reid

 

1

What holds the narrative
in its cold fingers 

as one might hold
a hot cup 

and drop it

 

 

 

My right arm failed, and I dropped a bowl of hot tomato soup, taking it out of the microwave.  After cleaning up the mess, and bandaging my fingers, I went out and bought a couple of bowls with big handles, easy to hold onto.  They work, even for one hand.

 

 

2

The left-right organizer
gave me 

an off-center stomach
right-handedness 

a tilted heart

 

 

 

In utero, a set of specialized cells organize the distribution of organs in the human body.  Generally, humans have bilateral symmetry, but inside, not quite so much.  After surgery my elbow had swollen up bigger than a grapefruit, filled with fluid, and as soon as she saw it the doctor said let’s drain that.  I sat in a large chair in the examination room and she got on her knees in front of me, lifted my bad arm onto her shoulder, inserted the cannula and gently squeezed the elbow joint. I held the bowl in place, with my only good hand.

 

 

3 

Tingle
In some fingers 

Numb in the others

How does one
hold the world

 

 

 

We were dancing to Panhandle Rag, that great old western swing tune, and trying not to trip over each other. I had my bad hand on her shoulder and wanted to keep it there but slowly it slipped
down her back. I tried to explain that I had a problem arm, with dead nerves and atrophied muscles while my hand slid down to her waist and stopped only when it hooked into a beltloop on her jeans.                                              Maybe she couldn’t hear me, but that’s it, she said, and shrugged off my good arm and walked away.

 

 

4 

On the other hand

there is always
another hand 

to hold on
to let go

 

    

 

My mom was a piano teacher - I took lessons for many years.  I learned how to play guitar as a teenager, and later on, picked up a few licks on mandolin, all of it dependent on a functional right hand.  I tried double bass for a while, unsuccessfully. My hand would go numb after a couple of notes, and I couldn’t carry the damn thing.  Various piano pieces have been written for the left hand, most notably by Maurice Ravel, commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the First World War. But I was never any good on piano. Now I can’t listen to music at all.

 

 

5 

Right hand dominant
all my life 

Now left hand only

How is it
you still feel the same?

 

 

When my daughter was a toddler we played a game we called ‘bad hand’.  I would tickle her with my left hand, very gently. She would grab the hand and hold it away from her tummy.  ‘But where’s the bad hand’ she’d giggle and I’d slowly bring my other hand, fingers wiggling, from behind my back and begin to tickle her more vigorously. She would wrestle the bad hand into submission and we’d both collapse, laughing, onto the floor.  She claims not to remember this at all.

 

Monty Reid is an Ottawa poet. His books include The Luskville Reductions (Brick), Garden (Chaudiere) and Crawlspace (Anansi), and his most recent chapbooks are Vertebrata (Turret House) and Where There's Smoke (above/ground). Magazine publications include Juniper, talking about strawberries all the time, Train, The Goose, The Dodge, Pinhole Poetry, The Malahat Review and many others.  He is the former Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine and, for many years, was the Director of VerseFest, Ottawa's international poetry festival.