Poetry by Susan Gubernat
Kintsugi I
I’m filling all the cracks with gold
so that it runs down the sides of this broken vessel
like magma and cools to a hard shine
because I’m old and know things
that might have kept me whole before,
that glint now like veins of ore my rough hands
pass over without beam or compass,
that like the mouths of the ancients,
gummy and gold-toothed, will spit and grin
brightest before sunset—and then
the green flash will break over the horizon,
swallowed by utter darkness.
so that it runs down the sides of this broken vessel
like magma and cools to a hard shine
because I’m old and know things
that might have kept me whole before,
that glint now like veins of ore my rough hands
pass over without beam or compass,
that like the mouths of the ancients,
gummy and gold-toothed, will spit and grin
brightest before sunset—and then
the green flash will break over the horizon,
swallowed by utter darkness.
Kintsugi II
Break the bowl to strengthen it.
Fill the cracks with molten gold
running down the rounded sides
the way lava flowed from the volcano
into the sea the night we arrived
on the Big Island.
Lava fields
a black moonscape, desolate
at twilight, spiky ginger flowers
lining the path of steam vents,
of skylights sunken into the earth,
brimming with liquid fire
like the eyes of a monster.
You were the monster
I didn’t recognize.
I kept you close, thinking
all that static to be passion
though it was cruelty, annealed.
Later when gathering the shards
after our life together
came apart I saw I could make
something of disaster.
Fill the cracks with molten gold
running down the rounded sides
the way lava flowed from the volcano
into the sea the night we arrived
on the Big Island.
Lava fields
a black moonscape, desolate
at twilight, spiky ginger flowers
lining the path of steam vents,
of skylights sunken into the earth,
brimming with liquid fire
like the eyes of a monster.
You were the monster
I didn’t recognize.
I kept you close, thinking
all that static to be passion
though it was cruelty, annealed.
Later when gathering the shards
after our life together
came apart I saw I could make
something of disaster.
Fantasies of Kintsugi
Where’s the artist to repair the sky,
cracked by lightning in a single night
that set forests on fire? No one
to pour molten gold into the fissures,
no potter to throw the clay
of this world onto a better wheel.
Nothing but smoke carrying the ashes
of owl and deer, swallowed
in the fog above our heads. No hope
to release them back into the earth.
cracked by lightning in a single night
that set forests on fire? No one
to pour molten gold into the fissures,
no potter to throw the clay
of this world onto a better wheel.
Nothing but smoke carrying the ashes
of owl and deer, swallowed
in the fog above our heads. No hope
to release them back into the earth.
Susan Gubernat’s most recent poetry collection, The Zoo at Night, won the Prairie Schooner book award and was published by the University of Nebraska Press. An opera librettist as well as a poet, she is Professor Emerita of English at California State University, East Bay. Born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, she now lives in San Francisco.
Photo: Linda Gould
