To Properly Use One’s Thumbs

Welcome to Digressions

Thank you for joining us for the last year for Mondays Are Free, and thank you to Patrick Rosal, janan alexandra, Essence London and Vaughan Fielder for a beautiful, year-long collaboration. (Stay tuned: we may turn that into a book or something.).

From here on out—or at least from here on into the foreseeable future—I’ll be sharing from a range of stuff I’ve been and plan to be working on—poems, writing about gardening, sport stuff (probably basketball in particular), teaching, etc. You might also find some orphan footnotes, short plays, drawings, and some entries into a thing I’m thinking of calling Or we could. I bet I’ll occasionally have guests. And other stuff. We’ll see. It’s called Digressions for a reason! I think we’ll shoot for about a post or two a week.

I’m glad you’re here.

To Properly Use One’s Thumbs

For braiding hair or brushing hair or untangling the knots in a friend’s, a beloved’s hair; for holding a pencil or a crayon or pen with which to write love notes as poems or recipes or hand-drawn maps or hand-written letters in envelopes which if and when they arrive we open sometimes with our thumbs; or holding a paintbrush with which to softly lay light on the knuckles, in the pupil, to softly lay the light that makes the shoe a sea, the sea a song; and too threading a needle and sewing a button or a cuff etc., the weaving of scarves and the crocheting of mufflers, and darning; darning, yes; let’s just say the mending arts generally, which can too include for instance the frayed or damaged piece of art, or a book, and will often include the mending of bodies, human and otherwise, pulling the flayed parts snug, bandaging them up; hearts too, holding them together; holding them, together; and kneading dough, and shaping loaves, and maybe with a knife scoring gently an X into those loaves, and spreading gently with your knife the butter, or dipping it into the oil, for with whom you eat, for by whom you’re fed; for by whom you’ve been fed; and pinching dumplings, and pinching spices, and pinching a baby’s cheeks or toes and pinching the suckers on a tomato or one or two leaves on a transplant of chard and deadheading marigolds or petunias is pinching too as is pinching a pot with which to pote as is pinching nipples which turns your love into a night blooming serous, turns her into a song, a sea; oh let’s just say all the erogenous instruments a thumb plays its part in playing; and holding a guitar pick, and lifting the octave of your saxophone, your wind instrument generally maybe, and bringing your flugel to your kiss, and guiding your trombone’s slide; and lifting the record (let’s say Nina Simone’s Emergency Ward, today let’s say it’s “My Sweet Lord”) from the sleeve, and placing the record on the turntable, and brushing the dust from the disc, and guiding the stylus to the groove; and for indicating approval or appreciation or ok-ness or fervor or turn it up or a whole host of other manual-linguistical things (sign language, etc.); and too for slipping on a baby’s sock, or bonnet, or tying a bib, or snaking a kid’s belt through the loops, or fiddling their button through the slot, or rolling their pants into cuffs over the little boots you use your thumbs to tie the laces of; and rubbing the dog’s velvet ear; and too peening the sickle, and slow-dancing the scythe, or whittling the spoon or ladle with which you dole the soup; or grafting the scion or bud; or holding another’s hand through the park or on the park bench or while dancing or hearing the story again or releasing the bad dream or watching the game or as they go through a door which is sometimes death; the thumb drawing small halos, eddies, into the base of the thumb on the hand it holds; or steadying the nail or holding the chisel or guiding the trowel or splinting the branch, or fixing the graft, or sprinkling seeds into the furrow in the earth you beg with a stick or your forefinger or sometimes the thumb on your non-sprinkling hand; or prying the clove from the bulb, using your thumb as a dibber, and dropping the prayer in; for dropping the prayer in; or unwinding the cucumber’s tendril from the sweet potato vine, or the tomato vine from the fig, or untucking the pepper from the rampant sage; or plucking the pear or plucking the persimmon (from the ground) or holding the spoon with which to eat the persimmon pudding (Nana’s recipe, on an index card you plucked from the tin box), or plucking the dried bean pod grown of yet more seeds given you; for loosing from the pod the beans waiting in there which I usually do by holding in one palm, which is my mother’s palm, the pod, and running with my other hand my thumbnail, which is my father’s thumbnail, along the pod’s seam, for pods too have seams, and with that lucky thumb unsealing or better still unzipping really the pod, un-seaming or unseeming the pod by which the beans, which are seeds, which are dreams, which are prayers, yet more given to us, will fall, dried, into your palm, the beans from the pod by your father’s thumb into your mother’s palm are birthed, midwifed, the dried chaff shiny on the inside and rocking at your feet like so many tiny vessels, or like wings, gilded, and you will notice, close as you are now, how most dried beans have bitty navels where they were affixed to the pod in which they grew, umbilical birthmarks they do not outgrow and will bestow upon their children and theirs theirs and theirs theirs for what could be forever as far as we’re concerned, which is really what the thumb was evolved to be.