Love Song for the Woman with Beautiful Hands
I
each day I wait for your signs
in the morning when you awake
at night I count every finger of your hands
your hands of bones and summer blood
your hands which you say have forgotten how to dream
as if winter could ever wean its desires of spring
or birds in the morning tell lies
and refuse to sing
II
in late afternoon we were walking on the shore
several dozen feet above the waves a congregation of birds
seagulls, herons, pelicans
hungry searching for a meal
then in the next breath
dove a pelican
like a fleshy arrow into the sea
plucked a fish and went off
III
I looked for you
on the beach
I wanted to lie down
next to you
on the cool sand
I wanted to show you why it’s important
to recognize the shape of your hand
the look of your hand
the special way to touch the lines
of your palm
the roads and paths
marks of eternity
I wanted to tell you about the pelican
how quickly it reached a decision
how it knew what to do
how to live and not die
but your hands which you say have forgotten
how to dream
your hands
which I look for
each day
| Kosrof Chantikian |
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levelheaded: Love Song for the Woman with Beautiful Hands
Two particular phrases in Kosrof Chantikian’s “Love Song for the Woman with Beautiful Hands” serve as a springboard for diving into the poem: “summer blood” and “cool sand.” Let’s start with the first.
“Summer blood,” used in the opening section to describe the woman’s hands, offers one of the poem’s few escapes from common speech. It particularizes the commonplace. Here, we get a dose of heat, a compliment to the intensity of feeling that propelled the poet into action. Something is boiling in the woman’s veins, and the speaker’s relationship to this has caused a similar stirring within him. While heartbreak seems to govern the work, there is a pleasantry associated with “summer.” This word, along with “blood,” also links us to the natural world in which the poem takes place. However, as essential to life as it may be, when visible, “blood” is associated with injury, sickness, and death. It’s associated with hurt.
“Cool sand” is a phrase we’ve all heard a million times. For this very reason, its appearance in the third section serves as an equally deserving emblem of the poet’s methodology. Chantikian does not call attention to his own artifice, but delicately, loosely tells a story. His tone is undoubtedly “cool.” His unembellished language grounds the poem in the everyday. Presented rather plainly, this story of loss becomes all the more devastating. Like the words “summer” and “blood,” the “cool sand” keeps us situated in nature—precisely where such casual catastrophy takes place.
The poem’s central image is as simple and complex as the phrases we’ve just examined. The second section begins with a couple longer lines that embody meandering along the shore. Then the poem literally narrows, thinning as the bird thins its own body and the speaker’s lens hones in on it. Because it is the shortest line, “dove a pelican” happens in a flash. But before we zoom past, let’s consider how flat this line would read if the syntax weren’t inverted, if the line simply read: “a pelican dove.” Not nearly as effective, right? The verb’s placement charges the line with energy, propelling the action forward. As an added bonus, in this crazy language of ours, “dove” is also a noun. The big, ugly bird on the hunt is also a small, pretty symbol of peace.
So, here we are. We’ve looked at seven words in the poem so far. We haven’t begun to examine how the pelican taking the shape of an “arrow” suggests Cupid, how the “plucked” fish could be perceived as lucky for having been chosen. We’ve said nothing about how the first section spans every time of day and three seasons—perhaps as a nod to the constancy of the brutal, beautiful events of nature. We’ve said nothing about the speaker’s need to explicitly tell “you” what he witnessed as manifested in the third section. We haven’t examined why the poem might end with an uncompleted thought, with a final stanza that merges two people, time, and the ever important act of looking.
– The Editors
