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      August 19, 2012Virginia SlachmanBlue Hand

      The artist must search deeply into his own soul, develop and
      tend it, so that his art has something to clothe, and does not
      remain a glove without a hand.
      —Wassily Kandinsky

      Today at the glass factory I fell in love with a blue-veined reticulated glass
      hand. Heavy, cold and translucent, it is not a hand held out in love
      or forgiveness. This hand is simply a hand, simply itself
      devoid of intention. I admire most, beyond its heft and cool
      presence, its detachment. I am much too fond
      of detachment. As was Kant; his devotion to disinterest
      spawns beauty like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. Across the way
      men in overalls dismantle an old house—whining power tools
      mix with wood’s hollow call. I should be reading
      Lorca but instead I’m flipping through a book on ornament, page after page
      of hand-wrought symmetry in gilt and finely wrought intricacies;
      the knots, the flowers, the pendulous, hanging and spotted
      pointillistic moments of pure color and form. Today I sent my daughter
      a new pair of gloves—black, supple leather with a cashmere lining. I can
      still feel the weight and smooth elegance of that blue hand, cold
      as my mother’s the day she died. I wasn’t with her though I recall the March
      day. I make myself picture touching her hands, cool and a little
      blue, the veins full of motionless tide that just seconds before
      had rocked to a halt after the pump stilled. For Lorca, the darkness of death
      is the light of the imagination. I’m not sorry to be devoid
      of feeling. Its absence leaves the mind’s blue light
      cool and composed, yet even it struggles against the infinite which is
      without reason. There is nothing of use to say about our private
      losses. The house across the way is now merely mounds of stacked
      bricks—clay and straw molded by men gone to dust long before the cool
      calculation of economy judged it
      extraneous. The book’s heft contains millennia we’ve strived
      against disorder, constructing geometry’s repeatable patterns—
      squares the haven of protection, lines of predictable journeys
      and a good end; countless lotus baptizing us over and over in pure
      radiance. How we make whole the fragments of reason—a vase, a wall,
      a stone relief … things that call to mind
      what is lost. My talisman is the body’s enactments: a blue hand
      standing in a pool of light. And my daughter’s—warm, thriving.

      from #36 - Winter 2011

      Virginia Slachman

      “My poems are frustrating and bull-headed. This poem (I thought) was about art, about an eerie blue glass hand I saw and couldn’t get out of my mind. But of course it’s not about art. It’s about what terrifies us—love and loss.”