Feather’s Hand
after a
fabric and mixed media collage
by
Feather Dundee
The hand
flies up, startled
from the
body in its evening
gown of
see-through cling,
its
underwire cups, its gold
lamé—an
invented wardrobe
for nights
spent dumpster
diving,
days packed into soup
kitchens,
thin parkas
from
Goodwill, or worse—
jailbird
issue. It claims
sparkle
for a born right
like the
scent of gardenias.
It
attracts like negligees.
And
because all hands are
two-faced,
the Fate Line
pivots
away from our eyes,
the meaty
palm refuses
to bare
its starred tracks.
What is
hidden learned to hide
(like
three gray hairs worked
into the
weave I magnify,
crisscrossed around the umber
ring
finger, hemmed in.)
I hold my
life in my hand
continually, the psalmist
and the
palmist sing.
Paint,
cloth, thread, beads
in colors
of flesh, ink, blood,
smoke.
Each fingernail floats
like a
Jupiter moon. Each
painted
knuckle winks
under a
digit’s gimp sleeve,
wearing a
snood of airy loops
and an
opalescent bead
like an
alert, rainbowed
eyeball;
turning the hand
into an
act of concerted looking,
a jeweled
row of audience
that
stares back, unblinking.
(With my
lens I spot a prickle
tucked in
a stem-stitched seam,
as though
the idea of the hand
had been
conceived in a field
of
thistles.) Scissored free
of any
wrist bone, framed
in Plexi,
the hand becomes a tawny
ghost, an
outline in the ethers
God traced
then forgot, or
a rising
sun, finger
rays
lifting in a batik
sky,
rimmed in gold
crewel,
chained by Feather,
who
threads oxygen in
through a
polymer
tube, to
keep living.
This is
her primordial
print, her
aboriginal
power
sign: A hand
in a
beaded seine
of black,
hairpin lace
she’s
drawn in. It has
no sequins
but it holds
its own
certain shine,
a
glitter-power tricky
as voodoo
flags.
In
reverse, it halts.
from
Feather’s Hand, (Swan Scythe Press, 2000)
