The power of touch: Coordinates – a poem by Maria Popova

‘No use asking why the knife was in my left hand then ...’ Photograph: Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum Photos

I still wonder
why the knife was
in my left hand
when I pressed it into
the watermelon bark
blade-side up,
pressed it hard and slow
and felt it stop at my bone,
felt no pain at all
as it split my thumb
along a perfect meridian.
I watched the blood spill
its perfect pomegranate seeds
into the aluminium spaceship
of the kitchen sink.

I was six.
I was learning directions.
Left became encoded
in the scar.
Across this slice of spacetime,
this half a lifetime,
I still glide my index finger over it
in animal instinct
when asked to orient.

Tonight I pressed my thumb meridian
into the equator of her bare sole,
she whose footfall I recognise
across the room,
across the gallery,
across the galaxy,
pressed it hard and slow
into the moan of her
animal pleasure.

Maria Popova. Photograph: Allan Amato

No use asking
why the knife was
in my left hand then,
or this particular foot
now.
Some things we just get wrong,
then make use of the scars.
Some things we get right
only when we cease pressing
against the blade of why.

• Maria Popova is a US based writer and curator of Brain Pickings (brainpickings.org)