Thursday, October 13, 2022

After Carol Ann Duffy’s Treasure

 




After Carol Ann Duffy’s Treasure

 

How the poet called lies

                fool’s gold.  Still, and none-

the-less, kept: beloved treasure.

Hoarded, lidded when dark is being

                lifted.  Its precision. The dark.  It’s – it is –

precision we’re consistently

                calibrating, weighing, eye-

balling the needle or digits on the machine. 

 

Having

                been in the mine or in

the wide-open sky finding or trying

                to find in the sluice and slurry

dredge and hammer and ax and bleeding

hands, it’s all drawn back to

                itself, where and under what

 

circumstances it was made and yet

                to be made.  As we read, real gold

is being made.  Aging.  Tell me, how do you expand

and then tame worth?  And then tell me:

which is more?  Labor to break

the world and her dirt open to expose the broken

                or brief lode of gold, to stow it

folded, in the once was skin of

 

a young doe?  Or the broker, who presses

                his scale in his favor by lifting

some of it away, unpaid for?  Or the jeweler

                with her warm ores pouring,

then briefly ssssssssst, quenched?  Or is the worth

                the beholder?  The beholding?

The seam of truth depleting to dusts

 

into autumn, under the yellows fallen,

                suffering such a leave-taking

in the curl (how the not yet brutal fifteen

                below zero, she is yet

months off) against the rib and stem

                a particularly brilliant cuff

of solid sun that when lifted

 

crumbles, succumbs to the drift

                of wind, bits of it gone for always,

bits of it briefly near: the elbow,

               the toe, the yet to be licked or kissed

lips . . .

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Ceramic




Ceramic

 

I slip behind her into the future; memory.

 

A bat swoops, the lake a silence of dark light;

how it will be, must be.

         

                   Carol Ann Duffy

                   Orta St Giulio

 

It’s true absolutely I watch all

Their movements as if they were

Porcelain, the finest ceramic

A king’s-worthy glaze surviving

 

The fire ungauged but by the wave

Of a hand over the flame.  How

Some make it unscathed, how

The sound of those that cant

 

Resist the furnace break

Though we cannot know what those

Are until its as cool as a memory,

The kiln door open, the heat

 

Released and we reach in to feel

For what we’ve made, what’s lost

In parts on the floor, in parts

On the shelf, a self in tesserae

 

Maybe, the simple shard

Of glazed clay waiting; amazed

The single piece that made

It through to the end was the crust 

 

End discarded as whimsy, simple

Lengths of a little girl’s fingers

Pressed together the way kids press

Thumbs meeting up-

 

Side down, finger knuckles joined

A handsome heart gleaming

The exact blue they needed

While each were cleaning

 

The pieces from the wheel

And making them pinch & here,

This too! Before the door closed &

The heat rose.  Here, Mama, this

 

Too.