The Hand --Eunice Tietjens (1884-1944) As you sit so, in the firelight, your hand is the color of new bronze. I cannot take my eyes from your hand; In it, as in a microcosm, the vast and shadowy Orient is made visible. Who shall read me your hand? You are a large man, yet it is small and nar- row, like the hand of a woman and the paw of a chimpanzee. It is supple and boneless as the hands wrought in pigment by a fashionable portrait painter. The tapering fingers bend backward. Between them burns a scented cigarette. You poise it with infinite daintiness, like a woman under the eyes of her lover. The long line of your curved nail is fastidiousness made flesh. Very skilful is your hand. With a tiny brush it can feather lines of ineffable suggestion, glints of hidden beauty. With a little tool it can carve strange dreams in ivory and milky jade. And cruel is your hand. With the same cold daintiness and skill it can devise exquisite tortures, eternities of incredible pain, that Torquemada never glimpsed. And voluptuous is your hand, nice in its sense of touch. Delicately it can caress a quivering skin, softly it can glide over golden thighs ..... Bilitis had not such long nails. Who can read me your hand? In the firelight the smoke curls up fantasti- cally from the cigarette between your fingers which are the color of new bronze. The room is full of strange shadows. I am afraid of your hand...... Eunice Tietjens, Profiles from China: Sketches in Verse of People & Things Seen in the Interior, Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1917, p.11. -- http://www.wretch.cc/blog/kamadevas\ --

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