Clay Baby

Clay Baby

The delicate clay baby has your thumbprint

under the chin, its hair and eyes are fingernail

thin.  When you brought it to me, cupped

in the palm of your hand I thought you just

wanted me to see.  You’d been working

at the dining room table all afternoon, rolling

and squeezing, the ball of the head flat

enough into the pine so it didn’t roll, and it’s

a wonder it came up like it did without breaking

thin as it was in spots.  It’s great clay you’d said, it doesn’t

dry out.  And so you gave it to me, the face

an eerie mirror, and let me feel and look.  Solid

and soft.  The wonder of your thumbs

are all through it: calf muscle, cheekbones,

and look, an all the way around the waist sweater-

cuff, tucked at the hips and ribbed, pleated.  Even

up to the chin, John Lennon in a turtleneck you said.  He is

fabulous I said and handed him back--are you going

to fold him up and roll him up and take

his snake arms (oh, look at that, toast

crumbs on his bum) and that made you laugh, but

in all seriousness you said He’s for you Mama.

And you flounced away like any God of Clay would

while I held your tender baby who I have to say

and may tell you later resembles the Bog

Men sunk thousands of years in the peat

sod gone all leather black, a badass in the mire.

I mean, the turtleneck!  Peel it back, lift it up,

and I bet the hips and ribs are if nothing else

copper bone.  The locked jaw of the last crone.

But not your man, no not your man.  He’s got me

loving ugly, and not the cliché ugly, but the under-

appreciated ignored subtlety of ugly, homely

let's say because of the way

this ankle bone is as noble as the chin, his

petroleum black skin he’s in and been made of is ageless

in the palms of your hands, and could speak

and think the most crazy wild bewitching things but

just doesn’t need to because being made

was enough.  Is enough.  Shaped and unbetrayed, 

breathed on, kept warm in a turtleneck sweater! with thumbnail cuffs!

Ohboy! and handed to me, for keeps, is enough.