Listen!
HERE BEGINS THE POEM OF MY LEFT HAND My left hand is a child moving clumsily and eagerly, shy in company. He lets his older brother do the clasping and pointing, all the most dramatic gestures. Everything is a joke to him because he knows he is despised for being left, but all admit that what is left is the best part. My left hand is always excited yet he claims to know nothing, is rather silent when I question him. He is growing so much more slowly than the rest of me--that is why he is not yet skilled, bold, and learned. For every ten years of mine he matures one, and I think when I die and am buried my left hand will be alive still, just coming into the strength of youth. I love to think of him in the ground, bold amongst the stones and clay, his time of adventure come at last, his music a man's music, studying the worm's mouth without desolation now that he has entered a time with no sun: too deep to freeze, too cool to sweat. He is never alone, he is in the great multitude of life that has been waiting for him. He has grown wiser than me through coming to know the beat of the world in the center of his body. From his house of clay he can watch the stars and the stretch of space beyond the farthest star. He has graceful years before he grows old, and even that will be a blessing like a silk glove, for as he softens the stones draw close and cradle him and call him their little old boy, so weak and in need of voices to teach him how to die and become a new mineral, moistened with forever.
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