The Hand
--Eunice Tietjens (1884-1944)
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 nar-
row, 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 fantasti-
cally 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......
Eunice Tietjens, Profiles from China: Sketches in Verse of People & Things
Seen in the Interior, Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1917, p.11.
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