Kintsugi by Amy Baskin

​ Kintsugi
—the art of repairing broken pottery with gold

see everything perfect
as already damaged.
Next year's model
already crashed and scratched,
cultivating penicillin
under the back seat from some
long abandoned dairy product
next to where the kids have
kicked off their track shoes.

Every new bespoke suit
for what it really is—​
threadbare with body odor
permeating each armpit,
bacteria burrowing into the fabric
like a stubborn badger.

Each custom home on our street of dreams?
Already demolished.
The priceless print from my grandmother?
Slashed by museum-grade glass.
Everything you value will be nothing one day
and everyone, too.

imagine your heroes
on their better days,
as already villains.
Whomever they cut with their
sharp edges and lacerating
tongues and tempers
let them come to the surface.
Each bloated corpse will astonish
the villagers, but not me.
The new is the old,
the alive is the dead.

When I look at you,
on my better days,
I see you as already gone.
Nothing more than a memory,
but the best one at that,
no matter how mad I am at you
in that moment.

Will you see me that way, too?
And at the same time,
which is always now, help me anyhow
to repair my chips with gold.
Highlight and beautify each scar
so I may hold all of the
terrible beauty.

We are marvelous in time.
Drink our fearlessness, lift us
up to our own mouths, sip the strength
it takes to wake up each day
and attempt to mend ourselves
in our hopelessly broken places.

​

Bio: Amy Baskin’s work is featured in Friends Journal, Every Pigeon, apt, and more. She is a 2016 Willamette Writers Kay Snow Poetry award recipient for her poem “About Face.” She wrote this poem when she first read Sherman Alexie's apology to women he had harmed and mistreated. Writing helps her to make sense of human failure and to explore why she still loves the disappointing and the wounding among us, including herself.

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