KINTSUGI (A PRAYER)
The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer.
Given what’s here—a blighted door; a bullet-riddled fender; a cleaved boulder, lichen-covered—you decide to make a film. Flashback: three horses in a corral. An ashy documentary feeling because first horse keeps turning in a circle as the stream erupts silently in bitter cress. It’s probably not a fender, it might be a folded-in barrel, rusting. A bullet hole looks like a child’s drawing of a star. Then a knot in the plank a branch passed through when the door was alive. The boulder has been there for a few thousand years, the cleft somewhat less. Not that the slope isn’t steep or wooded—remember your niece’s infant son. A random pile of sticks may not be man-made. Sometimes a canyon wren sings in the canyon. Second horse stands silent as a nest. So you rise and draw your hand across a branch of what you thought was piñon. As the hammer is wrapped in cloth, a silver thread flows out ahead of you. Who will say a needle is not fur? Forager, if third horse shimmers—
Glint Literary Journal 