A matter of hands

Peter Falk: I can't see you, but I know you're here! I feel it. You've been hanging around since I got here. I wish I could see your face... just look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here. Just to touch something! Here, that's cold! That feels good! Here, to smoke, have coffee. And if you do it together it's fantastic. Or to draw: you know, you take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line and together it's a good line. Or when your hands are cold, you rub them together, you see, that's good, that feels good! There's so many good things! But you're not here - I'm here. I wish you were here. I wish you could talk to me. 'Cause I'm a friend. ... Compañero!

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"Craft means handiwork, a matter of hands. And these hands must belong to one person, i.e. a unique, mortal soul searching for its way with its voice and its dumbness. Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem ... Poems are also gifts - gifts to the attentive. Gifts bearing destinies." (Celan, from 'Letter to Hans Bender')

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Ein Halsband aus Handen gab dir der Wald, so schreitest du tot ubers Seil
(The forest gave you a necklace of hands. So dead you walk the rope.)
from 'Talglicht'/'Tallow Lamp'

Die Hand voller Stunden, so kamst du zu mir ...
(Your hand full of hours, you came to me ...)

- just to take two early poems from the Selected Poems

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It is truly strange to no longer inhabit the earth,
to no longer practice customs barely acquired,
not to give a meaning of human futurity
to roses, and other expressly promising things:
no longer to be what one was in endlessly anxious hands,
and to set aside even one’s own
proper name like a broken plaything...
(Rilke, First Duino Elegy)

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to have in hand, at hand, handiwork, what's handy, a handle, handling, underhand, hand in hand, to shake hands, to give a hand, to be on hand, on the one hand and on the other ...

Celan, Rilke, Heidegger ... all these German hands - and that proffered hand of Falk's in 'Wings of Desire' ...