Hands

At the beach in Popotla, Baja California, Mexico, you can watch women gut fish.  One of them looks as fierce as a Frieda Kahlo self-study as she takes aim and slices open pale bellies.  A five-gallon bucket holds guts, entrails looking like slick tar thinned with a red tint, bulbous globules that seem to have been some organ of use now sprinkled with scales.  Hollow fish make a line on a paint-flecked table.  Her hands take another from a different white pail where the whole fish pile one over the next.  Wider hands than mine, and browner, have the plain sureness of a book.  You observe the clench and the action, the synchronization of left and right, the deftness of knowing what the tool of one hand will do with the lifeless, while the other hand maneuvers the knife; she could have been a sculptor of harder things.  Hands are that way.  It’s the accustomedness of action that stays.  The bend, reflex, and knowledge of cuts—small letters that make up a word and those words that make up an informing sentence—that have healed.  Watch a good cook weigh the salt in a palm and you know again the uselessness of a teaspoon.  How corn silk pulls free with the shuck of a husk in hands written with harvests.  In kitchens, it’s the aromas that tempt visitors near the flames.  They trust the untasted.  On the beach, the woman looks up while my digital camera guesses about what’s been framed in the lens.  There are long, handsome dimples framing her mouth and a smile and white teeth in her greeting.  She is a woman at her work on the beach of a little cove littered with clam shells and mussel shells and gulls swooping in for fresh bits from the buckets of refuse.   Her knife clicks through the fish and nicks the chipped wood with a rhythm – she is making music.  She is doing what she does everyday there is a catch brought to shore, a full bucket of dead shining silver to empty of their insides.  She is learned.  She is a library, every part of her an encyclopedia of life whittled and scored with the preceding scar, scab, sold fish, peso to buy the fabric for her daughters’ school uniforms. 



On a Kiss

Marvin Bell wrote “A kiss is just a kiss, but a sneeze is a small heart attack.”  Is that true?  Is my heart attacked when I sneeze?  Does it go on guard, remove concentration from perfectly paced sequential spasms to flinch, reconnoiter, take up its monotony again?  I would argue with Bell.  I have no clue as to the science of his statement in regard to a sneeze and the heart—but when is a kiss “just a kiss,” Mr. Bell?  I’d like to know.   

Rex ForgottenLastName kissed me in the backyard of AlsoForgottenFirst&astName’s house at the first Girl/Boy party I ever attended.  When he did the deed I was caught up and stopped from a running game of tag.  While his wet mouth worked on mine, though my wet mouth may have been working right back, I never thought “Kiss.”  I’m certain Rex Whoever did.  Thought “kiss,” stalked various females dodging the brilliancy of high-powered patio lights to avoid being “It,” grabbed the first ribcage within reach, and crushed his teeth and slobbers against mine.  I can’t remember his face, if he had acne or a hooked nose.  He could’ve been Adonis.  Or the hunchback of a French church.  Like his name, he’s forgotten.  But not the sudden knowing, the knowledge that I had been kissed.  I heard from somebody who knew somebody who knew Rex, that he’d bought a Jaguar XKE the year after high school graduation with some of the profits of IBM shares his grandmother bought when he was born.  Whoa!  How cool is that?  My question now is, “Did you know, Mr.  Rex, all along about the IBM shares?  Did you plan for just how you might spend a portion of your dividends from the age of five or seven or twelve?  Or, were you blindsided in the moment?”

Expectations on either or both sides, Mr. Bell, make a kiss not just a kiss.  It can be a theft, a blow, a tease, a kindness.  It can be an omen, an insult, a promise.  It is, I believe, always more than it is—even when “more” turns out to be less. 

Lynn, in first snippet, I love that "She is learned." --which you earned, as she had. And the whole point of the third one. Tom

Not ten seconds ago I posted a PM to you asking if you'd take a look at this.  My, but you are quick!  Or you read my mind.  Thanks.  ;)

Removed On Beliefs [my mood was showing through too mightily]

Number one: You are adept at connecting the strings to form the 'big web'. Skills of the sculptor connected to those of the woman. How your camera becomes an extension of your mind in its guessing. This woman is the artist painting her own life. You, the visitor in her gallery.  

What artist ever knows the thoughts of the viewer's of art? From one side the lens is convex, from the other concave. The focal point is the same.

I love the tactile descriptions.  

Number two:  God or no God, the idea of God connects us all.  God is the corner upon which the sides turn. Just as our mothers and grandmothers and eventually we become the the turning point for someone else to begin a new direction.  

Number three: Makes me laugh.  Makes me remember. Russell - Russell - Russell Mullins. Yes, that's it. He was a groper with the eyes of an angel. For him kisses were merely the pivot point upon which his arms swiveled and extended. Telescoping and made of rubber. Able to bend in strange places. I feel the raking of bricks across my skin. The hot metal of a heavy school door at the back of a building and the thrill once again. My brain's camera rolls the film back and the awkwardness of both players stands out.  But he still has those angel eyes.

He doesn't remember me and I could care less.  But the kiss was worth remembering.

I had always heard that the heart skips a beat when sneezing and wondered why more people who sneeze 5 or 6 or more times in a row don't die.  I remember as a kid daring God to take me by making myself sneeze a bunch of times (if you press hard with your thumb and forefinger at the top of your nose where your glasses might sit - you'll sneeze!)

Now I discover that your heart does not actually skip a beat but that the blood pressure changes and therefore the rhythm of the heart changes and when the next heartbeat happens, it is more forceful and therefore feels as if the previous beat was skipped.  The things you learn when reading Doiron!

While I was typing this missive - it appears that a portion was removed from the post - never mind - I'll leave my remarks anyway.

A fine, enjoyable read this morning.

Edison's film of a man sneezing:

ah, lavonne -- your memories of russel need to be set out in a poem.  love that metal door and all else about that kiss reflection!

thanks for all you've offered, including the edison film of sneeze and the science of it all.  you are the best! 

sorry, in a way, about removal of the Beliefs bit.  on reading it this morning, i had the sense of "vexing" Mama through a rudeness of manners which ignore the beliefs of others.  i can rant elsewhere.  and privately.  and try not to cause offense.  but i am sorry that you spent time responding and i wasted your time by ever having put it out there.  besides which, I do believe in energy, the positive and the negative, and the mystery of the mind and its power.  i'll take a chance on disbelief in God and gods, etc. -- but not on discounting what negative thinking is capable of causing. 

xo, lynn

double xo. :)

A wonderful read.     I remember my first real kiss.   I wrote a poem about it.............Q

Glad you stopped by and glad you enjoyed, Quentin.  Thanks!