She came out of the fire shock-eyed and half-baked The gaze I created stared back at me as if to say, what? what now?
What do we do now?
Engobes and washes and patina, black like the desert varnish on the surface of a rock. It’s simple, I tell her we take form, we weather
and tarnish in place.
It is a whole-body experience the build-up and forming of malleable clay, and then there’s the subtraction the canceling of all that’s extraneous, unnecessary.
We build and we coil and we bend, and then witness our cracking in the plainest of ways, all of it falls apart, fades away.
In the long run- potters and poets know their place baking bread in micaceous clay pots secret mark-making in the lines of a poem.
In the short run- the cure for isolation, loneliness is this: kiln-love, patience, and a #2 pencil.
By Monica Devine
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