On the Occasion of Seeing

"Two Handbuilt Leaf Bowls in Blue or Fuschia Glazes"

Decorations for a guest room, or form in exile?

This love is to be found in high-fired tableware
Among things we frequently brush up against--
Receipts and receptacles--our infrequent combings
Into the clay, if, as we elect first to build a foundation.

This is the sprigged bowl I mention as if it has changed
Hands, as if we've conjugated again from our strong
Contrasts, of colored oxides. But first, a coffee break.
And a gift, carried out with great verve, a fired ware

That reeks of the most each has suffered by the finish,
When the mood lurches glazed leaves of sweet gum
Red maple-incised, draping, thin slabs, like your fallen skin
Hardening with no hint of the mold.

Deeply No Matter What You've Been Given

It was not the guilt she felt steaming the enamel ashtray of Venus
More so than when she first started seeing a woman's skin in a skein

Of her own hair, a snake created itself somewhere in the sea crinkling

Before these shadows of eves, and from then on an unstopping

Facsimile—these offerings of both freedom and security insinuating
Like the rising Aphrodite—better another person reaching to tip

The flare from her lip, meaning foliage and temptation embowering

In full measure of the bite, while all in the view of the balcony
She grasps her neck, her hair sloughing off for the brighter

That we might have retained, underneath our own figures.

The Body Speaking What the Conscious Mind Cannot Say

Hydra actively dreams, drowsing in her writhing hair,
Setting her door to draft with blind fingers reaching
For you, nothing ipsilateral wasn't found, for how
A mere hair stroke generally arrests the climatology now,

Cathedral-ceiling; flinging all nude existence the covering,
And it possibly just occurred once this side street, this star

Map, before clearing in this digital range with the flashbulbs
Of this ripeness, so she'd make it past the chief of antiquities

To stand at attention in a plumed casque, the breaks of yes
Before this list, among other amendable things she'd be writing

Awake in new limbs, and this is the ceremony recorded there
of the exemplary, of becoming new, the second status.