Anne Harding Woodworth
I pick up gloves lost in the street,
put them in a pocket, take them home.
So far, I have a dozen. Two are brown. Ten
black. Eleven for the left hand.
Four are made for men in overcoats,
eight for women going far too fast.
The one right glove, fur-filled and exotic, pretends
an elegance that doesn’t match a single other.
Five are leather, three are yarn with cable stitches.
All are piled parallel in the dark, in a drawer of pine.
They look like hands, of course, some chubbier
than others. But they despair, I think,
and are deprived of loved familiar flesh,
solitary gloves unpaired, melancholy digits
seeking touch. And so, their vacancies I fill at times
with part of me when I am cold
and winter’s made my fingers stiff. Serenity—
to enter into where another used to be,
like fitting tight into a man,
who gently holds my naked hand.
Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of eight books of poetry and four chapbooks, with a fifth appearing in early 2024.