New Orleans Handshake

NEW ORLEANS HANDSHAKE

Jackson Square hot summer day
May 1964
sweet breath blown through the tupelos
the world ablaze with scents and promises

“sho me yo hand”

her hooded eyes absorbing fingerprints like sacred text
each ancient whorl and arch a hieroglyph
each loop a blunt rosetta
carved into a palsied hand

her calloused fingers stray
her touch a scorching brand
a quartering of every thought and deed
a fleeting scurry through my countless lives

recalling every graze and scrawp
the scratches
rashes
every careless bite
hot metal burn
burst blisters
punctures
every trivial abrasion
bruises blued and black like ink stains
tattooed lies
a palimpsest of secret pasts

but can she read through skin grown ragged
bones curled tight on empty spaces
atrophied and decomposing
life line waning
heart line barbed and twisted
fate line fading into ether

H

Beautiful imagery as usual, Hillwalker. But what did she tell you about your life? Did it come true? Did she really know?

Like usual, this poem is really, really good.

That last stanza makes this reader think that this might be a reflection on mortality. How would the voodoo lady/oracle/fortune teller read an older hand? Could she? And what did she say in 1964? 47 years ago, surely that hand must've built up many more layers of stories, tattoed lies, etc.

This line was really a runaway, probably this reader's favorite in the whole poem:

fate line fading into ether

... as we all must, eventually.







J

No critique from me Hill, the finer points of free verse being way beyond my ken - but I did find this a fascinating read with imaginative use of metaphor.

Kudos

Fellsman

An extraordinary read of a reading.

Awesome, I really love the last stanza! :D

This is very well written, H. The language is especially colourful.
I don't like to nit pick on poetry as it's a wholly subjective thing. Besides, I wouldn't know where to start here because there doesn't seem a word out of place.

Hi Hill. A great atmospheric poem but I'd cut the first stanza. The poem starts at "Sho me your hand." Great imagery and language throughout.

Live and be well - H

It's an astonishing poem, Hill, that owes nothing to any poem I've ever read.

Thanks everyone for reading and commenting.

@qim – that would be telling (and I was taught to show not tell)

@Jack – there were indeed a number of ideas at the back of my mind when I wrote this, along the lines of the fragility of life and what we leave as our legacy… someone trying to palm-read a dead man’s hand… and how our hands might give away the superficial secrets from our past but little else

@Fellsman - thanks for reading – it’s good that we have a mutual respect for each other’s preferred style of writing. As for knowing the finer points – I’m in the same boat as you, making it up as I go along

@Haunted/@Twota/@smerdyakov – I’m pleased you enjoyed it. Thanks for your kind words

@Hawkman – indeed the narrative begins with that single line of dialogue but I felt a little local colour was in order to set the scene (a touch of Deep South American Gothic possibly)

and @Prince – thanks also for the complement (I can’t say I’ve read anything like it either but we so often subconsciously imitate things we’ve come across in the past that left their mark).

H

An evocative, sensuous poem, hill, with a hint of menace and black magic. There are many strong images and figurative moments in the poem that work well. It reminded me of PoetTree's New Orleans poems, and my own 'Fortune Teller' poem I posted a while back.

In general terms, I'd like it to flow more easily; there are a lot of great images, but most of the lines are self-contained syntactic units, which demand a pause at the end of the line before the next is read, and creates a staccato rhythm, but an irregular one at that, because there's little balance to the lines.

This is most evident in the 'shopping list' fifth stanza; stanzas 3, 4 and 6 work similarly, repetitively describing the same thing in different ways. I thought this was a rather ponderous response and I can hear the poet coming through here. Perhaps this is more fitting when the narrator is at ease describing a landscape or making observations; here, maybe we'd expect the narrator to be taken aback and physically agitated in some way – asking questions about who this fortune teller woman is, or why she has seemingly just grabbed his hand, what she will find, that kind of thing. Ok, we get something like that a couple of stanzas later, but why not some immediate reaction?

I also wasn't keen on the largely lower-case, unpunctuated style of the majority of the poem. (No question mark at the end of the final stanza?)

The final stanza is very powerful, though, suggesting the narrator looking back on this memory years ago now asking if the fortune teller woman would still have the skill on older hands. There's a strong sense of the narrator's fears of mortality here, which makes for an effective ending.

And, smerdyakov, just to pick you up on this point:

Quote:

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I don't like to nit pick on poetry as it's a wholly subjective thing.

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There are very many things that are objective in poetry – rhyme scheme, form (free verse, sonnet, sestina, ode, haiku, etc.) stanza lengths, narrative perspective, tone of voice, line breaks, enjambment, assonance, sibilance, and all other phonological features; semantic or lexical fields; figurative language such as metaphors, similes, analogies, etc.; rhetorical features such as anaphora, antistophe, anadiplosis; use of sentences types and moods; other use of grammar and syntax, such as tense of verbs, modification of nouns and verbs, punctuation; connotations of words and images; intertextual references… etc, etc, etc.

Subjectivity only comes into poetry criticism when you weigh how successfully you feel the poet has used these techniques to express his or her thoughts, observations and so on – but even that's still quite objective. Otherwise, it might be simply that the subject of the poem doesn't appeal, which is fair enough, but a poem can still be respected for being well-written.

Hi b/v. I should've made the distinction, but I was speaking in terms of the meaning of a poem.

p.s. I had to look up half the devices you rattled off in that list. :)

Thanks @b\v - I take your point about the rather clinical style of much of this poem. It does resemble a list and there's very little of the narrator on view except perhaps that internalised question at the end (and yes - I began without any punctuation other than the speech marks so felt a ? would be out of place).

I was recording a hypothetical palm-reading almost as an impartial observer - hence the lack of response from the narrator to this invasion of his body space. But I'm happy you found some positive aspects and thanks as always for your astute feedback.

H

Your posts are rare, but always rewarding. You use a rich, beautiful language, so much at ease in English! and the contents are often thought provoking, while your sense of observation (hypothetical or real) is truly amazing.
Thanks for this new experience.
Best from Bar

Thanks @Bar - as always it's a pleasure to receive feedback from you.

H