The Lost Glove is Happy. Poetry Friday is early this week.

By Nuala Archer, from The Hour of Pan/Ama (Salmon Poetry, 1992). This wonderful poem arrived in my mailbox thanks to their poem of the week program. Special good wishes for anyone reading who's losing gloves, and who shares my fondness for Lubbock

Is it in the terminal I left
the brown, rabbit-fur-lined gloves
made in Taiwan? Gloves
I've worn in Ireland.
Gloves that kept my fingers
warm walking the bitter cold
coastline of Bull Island
with Howth and her necklace
of lights in the background.
Gloves lost now between Stillwater,

Oklahoma and Lubbock,Texas
on the way to see my mother
Come, she said, I'm in
the midst of desolation. Come.
Take Southwest Airlines, past
Love Field. I'll be waiting
for you. I'll be waiting.
And in the mall, when I got
to Lubbock, arrived to embrace
my mother in desolation, she had
me strip, try on outfit
after outfit-sweaters, trousers,
skirts, shirts, shorts, slips
and blouses-to see like
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
how does your garden, my garden,
grow? She in her mid-fifties
and I at the cliff-edge of
twenty-nine. My mother had me
fly to Lubbock and on the way

I lost my rabbit-fur-

lined gloves. When I got
there, when I arrived, when
I reached desolation, my mother
alone, in the middle of crazy

cottonfields, my mother in

desolation, I reached her,
I travelled to her,
to desolation, and in desolation
we were as lost as any
two mismatched gloves and

for a few moments we relaxed, lost
and strangely happy,
in the Lubbock Mall, without

labels stripped to our bones.