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Handbuilding With Clay
for dr k, who can fly
I am making birds with glumps of clay.
I give them black desirous eyes.
The ural owls and the elf owls hoot
and the speckled screamers have their way
with me, breathing hard inside me as they rise.
But I have a burning block against saying
certain ordinary words. I cannot utter them
without changing to some bloody crow.
To release them from the stem
and capillaries of my brain would fully
ravage all the safety that I know.
The eagles, bitterns, swans – dream
birds I have made from the white raku –
can make me less detached
from life and gentler with myself and you.
I observe the larger masks and the light cream rust emu.
Their eyes close slowly, lashing down, matched
almost in color and expression, almost out of time.
They almost say the words for me, releasing
all my fear. They would be kind, I think, rewrite my story.
Sometimes I even think those faces
have ample wit to do it, though they are cracked in places
I did not intend. It was my own mistakes
in hollowing that formed the roughest spots.
In many ways these works are like the inkblots:
they live on their own, make the imagination rise,
and reveal a mystery that communicates.
I wish I could live in them concretely.
Ungrounded, they are woodenfaced and mute.
My spectral raptors peck and claw the sky in silent pantomime.
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