The Hand Implements

By Danilo John Thomas

The Cupboard Pamphlet

ISBN 978-0-9978996-6-5

Danilo John Thomas’s The Hand Implements

I like to hand-rivet, to peen the roves, feel the copper fold and shudder in the handle of the hammer, hear the nail quiver and not bend, ring and stand and fortify the hold. Nip the tip of the excess nail off to finish the rivet, and shake to see the steel held. … The scar on my palm smooth as the weld that made the tools useful. A fresh mound of dirt in the yard that covers rats. She loves sunflowers. I want to buy sunflowers for my wife, present them to her with a steady forearm. Hammering holds. Hammering holds. Hammering holds.

[Danilo John Thomas, from the story “Hammers are the Domestic Tools” in The Hand Implements]

The language of tools in Danilo John Thomas’s The Hand Implements is the language of the earth and love and nature and violence. The slim story collection, put out by The Cupboard, uses tools and their function as an axis around which we learn the lives of a handful of characters in a Montana town. While the stretches of time and subject matter of the stories vary, they all elevate the words of physical labor to poetry, and in doing so, join a long tradition of writers merging the lyric with the dirty fingernails of those who make their living through the work of the body. Tools and their functions are made human in these stories. In some cases, the tools that give title to the section literally appear, such as in the Phillips Head Screwdriver section of the first story, “Torque and Slippage,” while in others, like Star Head Bit, as a dying man looks at the night sky, he thinks, “I swear those stones glisten at attainable distances” (7). Finding the relationship between title/subtitle and text is one of the many pleasures of this collection.

The second story, “Weathered Shells: A Triptych,” reads like a circadian rhythm, a natural refrain of wanting and blood and machinery, and story that builds less through narrative drive than through the accumulation of images and the driving force of the lyric: “My gorilla eyes slurp on the sky like plucking dough, like bunching cotton. The bones brittle and smoking. The most dangerous part of the eruption is the cloud that avalanches soot” (13). The story reads as an incantation. Each sentence is its own weird poem.

Other stories though, like “Hammers are the Domestic Tools,” have a clearer narrative through-line, and offer attempts at human connection, failures, and the most achingly familiar in between: partial successes. We love one another, but do not profess that love as we would wish. Or love changes. People change. We do not always drive to the next town when a friend says come. We miss our chances, and have to keep living.

What is uncomfortable about these stories is also what makes them so good. Violence and blood are commonplace, a matter-of-fact part of the lives of these characters, not glorified, just present, and it’s that omnipresence, its un-surprise, that feels so uncomfortable. It would be better to read this from afar, but we can’t.

I’m thinking of a creative writing student I had a few years back who used to complain about not knowing what to write about. He loved washing his car, though, and would quickly explain the various materials and motions, the order, the parts of the car. He washed his car with the same friend every Saturday. This is a book I’d like to hand to that student to show him an example of the pedestrian made spectacular, of the tools and processes of everyday life becoming metaphors and anchors for thinking more deeply about that life. Tools make human life easier, and are also the objects of human violence and destruction. We create, we ameliorate, we destroy. The Hand Implements give us this self-reflection, and in it we hear our own lovely music, and our blood.