DAVID\'S HANDS

DAVID\'S HANDS

DAVID\'S HANDS

You have the hugest hands and feet,
artefacts from spacious times.
Fire must have made you in a hectic moment
and along a swift trajectory.

You stand upright in museums, almost
at rest, veins bulging all over.
The Goliath’s boast
            – which called your wrath into being –
has fled, but you listen still, your lids
drawn up from the bulbs of your eyes
while you fathom your reach.

When you were still locked
in that abandoned marble behind the Duomo
you were called giant.
Now you walk the city, compact and resolute,
looking for your next task.
When night falls, you emerge under streetlights
humming with your own strength,
flicking the little thong in your right hand.

And always the pebble goes round and round in your mouth,
like a man at the point of discovering speech.

I saw you there.

I ran home and rewrote
what I had written before.