Love for a Hand

By Karl Shapiro 1913–2000 Karl Shapiro

Two hands lie still, the hairy and the white,

And soon down ladders of reflected light

The sleepers climb in silence. Gradually

They separate on paths of long ago,

Each winding on his arm the unpleasant clew

That leads, live as a nerve, to memory.

But often when too steep her dream descends,

Perhaps to the grotto where her father bends

To pick her up, the husband wakes as though

He had forgotten something in the house.

Motionless he eyes the room that glows

With the little animals of light that prowl

This way and that. Soft are the beasts of light

But softer still her hand that drifts so white

Upon the whiteness. How like a water-plant

It floats upon the black canal of sleep,

Suspended upward from the distant deep

In pure achievement of its lovely want!

Quietly then he plucks it and it folds

And is again a hand, small as a child’s.

He would revive it but it barely stirs

And so he carries it off a little way

And breaks it open gently. Now he can see

The sweetness of the fruit, his hand eats hers.

Source: Selected Poems (2003)

Biography

Karl Shapiro's poetry received early recognition, winning a number of major poetry awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, during the 1940s. Strongly influenced by the traditionalist poetry of W. H. Auden, Shapiro's early work is "striking for its concrete but detached insights," Alfred Kazin writes in Contemporaries. "It is witty and exact in the way it catches the poet's subtle and guarded impressions, and it is a poetry full of . . .

Continue reading this biography