---
title: Rough gloves
genre: verse

id: roughgloves
toc: "Rough gloves"

project:
    title: Elegies for alternate selves
    class: elegies
    order: 16
    prev:
    - title: Love Song
      link: lovesong
    next:
    - title: Ronald McDonald
      link: ronaldmcdonald
...

| I lost my hands & knit replacement ones
| from [spiders' threads][], stronger than steel but soft
| as lambs' wool.  Catching as they do on nails
| & your collarbone, you don't seem to like
| their rough warm presence on your [cheek or thigh][].
| I've asked you if you minded, you've said no
| (your face a table laid with burnt meat, bread
| so stale it could [break a hand][]).  Remember
| your senile mother's face above that table?
| I'd say she got the meaning of that look.
| You'd rather not be touched by these rough gloves,
| the only way I have to knit a love
| against whatever winters we may enter
| like a silkworm in a spider's blackened [maw][].

[cheek or thigh]: feedingtheraven.html
[break a hand]: weplayedthosegamestoo.html
[maw]: serengeti.html
[spiders' threads]: poetry-time.html