By Hand

John Reibetanz

• Publisher: Brick Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781771315036
• eBook ISBN: 9781771315043
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poems that examine the creative achievements of the human hand, from cave art to contemporary photography. John Reibetanz's twelfth collection, By Hand, begins with an epigraph from Lewis Mumford: "Until modern times, apart from the esoteric knowledge of the priests, philosophers, and astronomers, the greater part of human thought and imagination flowed through the hands." Reibetanz's new poems investigate human creativity as a visceral interaction with the world: our imagining hands finding the music implicit in the stuff of earth, a "duet// of earthbound songsters," of mind and material, each shaping the other. Centered on this duet, the book encompasses the wide-ranging aspects of our humanity—hands used for good and ill—portrayed in the examined paintings and sculptures, gardens, tapestries, photographs, and carvings. And they explore in particular the relationship in these artifacts between the "givens" of nature and the modifications and contributions of human culture. As Roo Borson says of the collection, "the poems are shot through with moments in which language's particular dexterity comes into its own and real objects are remade, as when these lines from 'The Installation' celebrate the 'commonality of clay' in a relief by della Robbia:" the light-quickened humus of the eyes that, for hundreds of years, have read the notes inscribed on the banner an angel is unscrolling…

IV

Earth Tones:

“immersed”

Sonnets to Orpheus, 2:14

from the German of Rainer Maria Rilke

Look at these flowers, loyal to the earthly,

to whom we on the brink of fate lend fate—

but who knows that! If they regret withering,

it is our lot to be their regret.

All things want to float. Yet we move heavy with doom,

loading our selves on everything, by gravity enraptured.

For things, oh, we are withering teachers,

while in them eternal childhood blooms.

If someone took them into his innermost sleep

and slept deeply with things, oh how lightly he’d rise

renewed for the new day, up from their shared deeps.

Or maybe he’d stay, and they would bloom and praise

him, the convert, now like one of their own,

all become siblings, hushed in the winds of the meadows.

Beyond Grasp

They begin in hand to hand combat the man-hand’s thumb

and fingers locked around the bow saw’s haft easily

wrestling the leaf-hands to the ground though far outnumbered

by those fine-lobed butterfly-thin flappers hangers-on

that crash down shuddering with the felled limbs they cling to

as the row of pointed teeth chews straits through the ringed grain

and once the carver’s hands have clamped the plank to his bench

the attack begins afresh mallet and chisel slash

hunks and chips from the pinioned timber but what those tensed

fingers search for cannot be found in the most deeply

cached heartwood haunting instead the carver’s mind reverse

ghost yet to come to life as pared stem bevelled leaf-edge

and burnished petal the tree sacrificed to turn its pith

from keelboard to rigging undergrooved ripples swelling

as with a breath to take the shape of the dreamt blossoms

and though this posy will never sway in wind or draw

bees in with nectar it will not draw into itself

in death unwilting bouquet for which he turns thumbs down

on what pulses and passes manhandling the pale wood

into which he carves his fear and ours deeper pallor

than the most tightly folded flower or clenched fist can hold

Needlework from the English Civil War

1.

black ink the only thread drawn into the paper with

the tip of a needle or seamstress’s pin thinner

than any quill point and thus more thrifty black because

the stitches of time are so often woven of loss

the Archbishop beheaded mr dod and Goodwife

Liechfield dead and Mr Quarles the poet all within

two neighbouring three-inch frames but also black because

only the cloth reverse knows all the colours in His

truestitch we see through the fabric darkly our weavings

all aranwork of aranea the swart spider

cobwebbed and cobbled together we longer retain

things taken from us than given Lord pardon our un-

thankfulness for the raising of Banbury Siege Bess

Bamford’s marriage the King’s rescue from Oxford and red

satin in the very same two frames truth not something

that unrolls before us as a skein or seamless scroll

but must be worked with myriads of tiny stitches

its mingled yarn evident even in ink’s frozen

2.

confluences where stars ciphers twined involutions

of freestanding capitals inscribe how the past swirls

through and overruns the present ravellings of ink

fountaining like the red stripes on Holofernes’ neck

from the patterned legend of Judith embroidered by

Elizabeth’s sister Judith to the plain story

her needle never traced of a King brought to the block

in some space beyond the paper’s edge frameless and blank

beyond stitching beyond reach of simples flourishing

in bordered gardens the rooted one at her back door

or the wrought one never watered yet sempervirens

spreading from the feet of her silken Adam and Eve

Transparencies

The layered whoness of this photograph includes both

seen and unseen a cast of posers overflowing

Julia Cameron’s frame bearing witness to her sense

that the selves we wear for the world’s lens bare only part

of our heartland so her husband Charles whom Goneril

might have called milk-livered here commands the stage as Lear

in profile lips pursed above snowy beard right eye iced

with a contempt that lurked unguessed in Charles for the first

seventy-eight years of his life until it froze out

Cordelia who embodied here by Alice Liddell

has already lost her focus vague grey eyes staring

through the fogged looking glass of a childhood left behind

while her sisters Alice’s as Cordelia’s sharpen

behind Lear’s back one of them pointing a gemmed finger

to his robe whose beaded edge leads down to the photo’s

centre where clawlike fingers ring a sceptre their grasp

appropriately strong for Charles whose grip on life out-

lasted that of Alice’s sister and of Julia’s

own daughter also a Julia dea...

Table of contents

• I. Instruments: “special anatomy”
• II. Visions: “magical identification”
• III. Fingerings: “a drawn bowstring”
• IV. Earth Tones: “immersed”
• V. Outreachings: “a creativity we cannot fathom”
• Notes
• Acknowledgements