Most poems about grief keep the sorrowing person at the centre. Dave Bonta does something stranger and hands the scene over to the speaker's own hands. They sit at a bar with a glass of brandy like two old companions, while the "I" of the poem stands slightly outside them, crying and being overheard. The central idea seems to be that grief can split a person in two, so that the body becomes first a witness, then a comforter, and finally a deserter.
The opening couplet sets up an odd, sheltered intimacy. The hands "huddle", a verb we usually reserve for people keeping warm or sharing a secret, "with a dram of brandy", a small, old-fashioned measure of medicine for shock. They sit at the bar "as if / at my own table." The "as if" admits the pretence. A bar is public and a table of one's own is private, so the hands seem to be building a home out of a borrowed stool. The line break after "as if" makes us wait for the table, as though the imagination needs a moment to leap.
The turn comes with "hearing me cry / they touch one another." Hands have no ears, so "hearing" is a deliberate impossibility, and it is what pulls the speaker apart from his own body. The crying is reported flatly, with no adjective and no explanation. We never learn the cause. The poem cares about the response: one hand reaching for the other. It is a very human gesture, self-consolation, because nobody else is there to offer it. The title adds a pun. "Hand to hand" suggests something passed along, but in the phrase "hand-to-hand" it also suggests a struggle at close quarters. Comfort and conflict both hover over the touch.
The final couplet withholds the gesture we expect. Pressed palms are the standard picture of prayer, and the poem raises that expectation only to refuse it: "not to pray but to part." The sounds make the swerve audible. "Pray" and "part" begin alike and share that rolled r, so one small change of vowel and ending flips the meaning. The hands touch, then separate. The last line, "having had no quiet", is ambiguous. Who has had no quiet? The hands, worn out by the weeping? The speaker? Both? With no punctuation, the phrase can attach to "part" as a reason, or float free as a general verdict. Either way, the poem ends on the word "quiet" while naming its absence, so the one thing the speaker wants arrives only as a word.
The form supports this restraint. There are eight short lines in four couplets, with no rhyme, no capital letters and no full stop. Pairs suit a poem about two hands, and each stanza is a small pairing of its own. The enjambment is constant, with sentences sliding over "as if / at" and "cry / they touch", so the poem keeps tipping forward without ever landing. The missing final punctuation leaves it open. Quieter patterns of sound hold it together. "Hands" and "brandy" share an *-and* sound, and "huddle" and "hands" share their opening h, giving the first couplet a muffled warmth. Later come the harder, clipped words "touch", "part" and "pray", as the comfort turns into a break.
What makes the poem significant is how much it gets from displacement. It never says the speaker is devastated, lonely or exhausted. It shows hands doing what a person in that state might do, and then shows them giving up on each other. The poem also declines two consolations, prayer and self-comfort, without commenting on either. Its refusal of an easy ending lets the reader sit with the unsettled feeling. It is a few seconds' reading, but it leaves one lingering question: if even your own hands cannot stay together to console you, where does the comfort come from?