Friday, September 10, 2010

Answered poem

Fall 2008: I moved on to poetry from pottery. I spent my days spinning clay on a wheel and filling my room with pots. Then I started to treat each pot as a poem, as a life, and what are we but vessels that hold ideas, opinions, information? A pot has a purpose—to hold a substance—but you always need an opening to get it back out again. I transfer my essence to you, but it never leaves me. The liquid doubles, flowing, over the rim of my mind, the dam of my ego. My cup runneth over, and I add more clay, more grey matter, to my self, my pot, the vessel, the container. I wonder why we’d ever need containers to survive—why not lay everything out so nothing is hidden, compartmentalized, hidden? Why not pour out our liquid into a common river and comingle, together, forever linked in chemistry by the molecules of our souls? How can I change the course of the salmon in my stream, find the way back to my course. One day I’d like to point at something and say: That is my soul.
Remove the shadows. All is light. Everything is water, everything is liquid, and once we decide that we are not under water, but that we are water, maybe we can bond in spiritual cohesion. No, it won’t be just spiritual. I think one day our water will break and we’ll give birth to ourselves. We’ll give birth to ourselves and we’ll enter the womb, forever floating, thoughtless and safe. We will be. And we will be together, without a pot to hold us.

Fall 2010: Then I was mud / Slipping, babbling, sloshing, giggling, sticking unto shoes / Joyously lapping up every drop of rain / Feeling myself flowing & expanding into the infinite // & now I am baked, I am cracked, I am formed but fragile & cold / The kiln has burned the soul & the searching right out of me / If I were mud you could bend me with your hands, we could embrace between your fingers / Our forms could meld together until distinction became inapplicable / But I am dry, I am rough / I am closer to being finished but I am further from being whole

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