I wrote a poem:

Workmanship

Fingerprints, I am given to understand,
Exist to make one able to grip things:
At work I stretch to give the book’s spine one last nudge
Into its place on the top shelf with one fingertip,
Leaving a sweaty streak on the slick mylar dustjacket.
Because of the tiny hairpin whorls
I do not have to fetch the stepstool.

(Far from this landlocked city the sea moves,
Carved by gravity into eddies and ridges
That settle into one another again and again,
Teasing itself again and again with riddles
That have no answer)

Again, I learn, without the funny idiosyncratic patterns
On my palms and fingers, I could not half feel
The texture of a woodworking tool
As I pick it up and toy with it, the wood smoothed with age,
And lay it down next to its brothers
Before putting my chin in my hand and watching
As its owner takes it up, to strop it with practiced movements.
These seasoned handles will soon be gripped by hands
More knowledgeable than mine, to carve shape into dumb wood,
To make something out of nothing.

(Rainwater curdles and floods in endless moving drapery
Under the streetlamp and down the pavement,
Pricked only briefly by fresh drops flung hard from the sky)

Without my fingerprints I could not imagine
The honest knowledge of a lover’s flesh,
Alive to every down-hair smoothness and curve and anomaly:
It is all here, the lines of vicariousness drawn upon my hands,
Never to be washed off under the scentless scent of water,
A made thing, the seal of my hands, of myself,
Hovered over by the Holy Spirit,
No longer without form and void,
Something out of nothing.