A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page
not on the ecstatic body.
Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin's smoothness,
not ink.
The maple's green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.
A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.
This brings us back to the old Zen tradition of the koan. Koans were often phrased in the form of questions that lacked an easy answer. For example “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” “If tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?” 
 The hand, then, is the thing that holds the unanswerable question. A hand is a cradle of mystery. Because the question “rises, swarms, departs,” we can never know the answer. We should just enjoy the fact that our bodies are vessels of the unexplained.
A Hand