Gloves

Damen O’Brien

I glimpsed the truth once on a Tokyo street, waiting

at Ginza’s rushed crossing, spilling with people, while

the billboards rolled their models away and Christmas

lights enacted their electric mangers and we all milled

like a spread of negative filings keeping our space,

waiting to cross, when a woman who’d been standing

there with her phone to an ear began wailing, collapsing

into herself, the line parting around her like a miracle

of water and those that passed glanced with horror

at her uncontrolled weeping, then five policemen

appeared from all sides to enclose her like a wound.

There’s an art in Japan, which epitomises their aesthetic:

the practice of fixing broken pottery with a seam of gold—

gluing imperfection with treasure until the new whole

is even more precious. They call it Kintsugi. Everybody

focuses on the beauty created from the broken thing,

but some solid vessel must first be damaged before

each masterpiece can be formed. I’ve never seen them

forged but I imagine the Japanese masters must use long

leather gloves, sooty and stiff with heat to seal each break.

For display, I imagine they handle each vase with the soft

thin gloves of musicians or conductors, the same gloves

curators use when they unwrap pottery first turned then

broken ten thousand years ago. When the police shuffled

her away to wherever they send those who cry in public

places, to wherever they take the mad and transgressive,

each officer cautiously held her by elbow and shoulder

and ushered her gone with those same soft blameless gloves.

DAMEN O’BRIEN is a multi-award-winning poet based in Brisbane. His poems can be found in New Ohio Review, Mississippi Review, Aesthetica Literary Journal and Arc Poetry Magazine. Damen’s poems have won the Moth Poetry Prize and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Damen’s latest book is Walking the Boundary (Pitt Street Poetry, 2024).