These hands

So what will you do with them, these hands of yours,
when the beloved has left the room?
They lie in your lap – so large, so helpless, so strange —
as if they belonged to another. You raise them,

as if to make some large gesture, to point
towards some object beyond the horizon, and say:
“This is what it means when it all comes down to it.
This is what it really means.” Instead of which

you drop them again, because you know
that the connection is broken – the thread
that invisibly linked you to her body.

When the beloved has left the room, when the bank
has broken, when the ship has sailed –
you let your hands fall back into your lap
and you learn to sit very still, your gaze
turned inwards; your voice, for the moment,
dried up; your mind on pause,
waiting for the dam to burst,
for the poems to emerge in the place where she used to stand.

 - Jacques Coetzee