"Handshook" is not quite a word, and the poem begins by unsettling us with it. The title fuses "handshake" with "hand shook," so the gesture sounds already finished, like something remembered. What follows is a ten-line attempt to say what a handshake can do when knowledge has run out. The speaker looks at people he cannot know, and instead of resolving that distance with facts, he resolves it with belief, and he places that belief in the body, at the point where two hands meet.
The first stanza sets up a vision and almost immediately cancels it. "I see people as light / rich with use" is a lovely, strange pair of phrases. "Light" can mean luminous or weightless, and "rich with use" suggests something worn smooth and made valuable by handling, like a tool or a step. People appear here as glowing and lived-in at once. Then comes the flat reversal: "but they are not." The grammar won't say what they are not. Light? Rich? Used? That open gap is part of the poem's honesty, because the speaker's seeing and the facts of the matter have separated, and he doesn't pretend otherwise.
The second stanza is where the poem turns personal. "And I do not accept that" is a small act of stubbornness. Then the reason arrives in a fragment, "not knowing any," which can be read two ways. It might mean that he refuses the correction because he knows none of these people and so has no grounds to accept it. Or it might mean that he refuses to accept the condition of knowing none of them. Either way, the speaker's argument rests on ignorance. Notice, too, how negatives pile up. "Not" appears three times in six lines ("they are not," "do not accept," "not knowing"), and the stanza feels like pushing against a closed door.
The door opens in the final stanza, which contains no negatives at all. "So I believe" borrows the vocabulary of logic, but the "so" doesn't follow from anything the speaker knows. Belief steps in where knowledge can't, and it lands on a concrete image: "our hands / meeting / present / being us." Look at the pronouns. Until now we have had "I" and "people," and "they." Only here do "our" and "us" appear. The plural is created by the contact itself. The word "present" does a lot of work in its isolated line. It can mean here and now, a gift offered, or the act of presenting oneself, and the line break lets all three hover. "Being us" goes further than saying the hands represent us. The hands are us.
Formally the poem is spare and quiet. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and "I" is the only capital inside the text, so the lines lean into one another as a single drifting thought. The rhythm narrows as it goes. The early lines run four to six syllables, and the ending shrinks to "meeting," "present," "being us," single words that arrive one at a time like the slow closing of a grip. The page offers a small echo as well: "use" at the end of line two and "us" at the end of the poem differ by one letter. Whether or not that was planned, it suggests that the people "rich with use" become "us" through contact. There is also a contrast of tenses. The title is in the past ("shook"), but the poem ends in -ing words, "meeting" and "being," which keep the handshake in progress rather than finished.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without claiming too much. It never says we can truly know one another, and it admits that the radiant picture of people may be false. Its claim is smaller and perhaps more believable: that a moment of touch can make an "us" where there was only a crowd of strangers. In a handful of words, it turns a very old problem, how we reach other minds, into something a reader can do with their own hand, and it shows how a poem can be both a puzzle and a gesture.