Fingernail Clippers

I don't know what they're called
in Italian or Russian or Turkish
but I intend to find out.

They are a singular plural
in English.

A sea creature of lore had a
gigantic, snub-nosed head
and a tapering body. Our
digital blacksmiths hammer
out replicas.

Lever and fulcrum and
paired toothless blades:
the spare architecture
of a specialized tool.

Owing to his mania,
the reclusive billionaire
eschewed clippers and let
his fingernails accrue
like stalactites. They clicked
like scurrying roaches.

Crows and monkeys groom
each other, picking bugs
from feathers and fur. A calm
comes over them as they pick
and peck. Thinking of them,
I clip a thumbnail--hiding,
like them, from hunger and
fear for a moment, attending
silently to a bodily chore.


hans ostrom 2020

Fingernails

In adolescence, I bit my fingernails. Later I stopped. A carpenter's assistant for many summers, I performed the ritual of hitting my left thumb with a hammer, losing the nail--that black cloud of blood lying under there like a thunder-cloud. If memory serves, I didn't get my first professional manicure until after I was forty. I think I've probably gotten three more since then. In my figurative neck of the literal woods, a manicure for men was of course unheard of, and if it had been heard of, it would certainly have disrupted certain constructions of "manhood." Now, I gather, manicures for all manner of men are routine, and apparently wide-receivers in the National Football League are known to get manicures and pedicures--protecting the feet so the feet can get the body to where the pass needs to be caught by the hands, which make the money. When an old coach on television learned of this, he shook his head gravely. Another clear boundary of manhood erased! Football players going to a salon! Mercy!

Now I have a split thumbnail, and I gather it will be split for the duration. I have not heard of a way of inducing the split to heal itself. I blame the breakdown on too much yard-work.

In any event, I've clawed my way through several drafts of a fingernail poem, and here 'tis:

Fingernails

by Hans Ostrom

Neither bone nor skin nor food,
fingernails are tools we mouth,

deploy, and decorate. None
of us is ever so civilized—

whatever civilized means--
that we won’t, when

need be, start to claw,
scrape, dig—evolutionary

eons collapsing, leaving
residue of whole lost worlds

in our instinctual hands. Just
to scratch the scalp is such

a human gesture—and not; such
a basic lice-finding task—and not.

If your fingernails are soiled, they
file a report on your social status.

If they are manicured, they may
purr concerning leisure’s delicacy. If

bitten, they murmur of gnawing self-
doubt. If artificial—how fascinating.

I have heard that employees of alleged
civilized societies pull out fingernails

with pliers. This is torture: remember?
It is blood underneath human fingernails.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom