Oblivion lives in a matte black dustbin
in the corner of Julie’s studio.
Lid on, it eclipses itself, a Buddha
beneath notice, waiting under primitive
shelves laden with pots-in-progress:
leather-hard or biscuit-fired, provisionally
painted, the stoneware mute,
a Morandi in waiting of milky bottles,
milk and dust…
You are making
a pinch-pot, idly turning and pressing
and meanwhile thinking of something else—
perhaps your mother, gone forever,
or the bag you want to buy—when
the wall gives way. Clay has a memory,
Julie says; she goes to the suddenly
evident dustbin, and lifts the lid. Inside
a wet glint, opalescent,
full as an egg
of creamy gray shadow, sediment
ground down finely and suspended
like a verdict in a tone. It stirs,
gathers body. Slip!—but not as we know it:
the wettest slip you’ve ever seen,
insipid liquefaction, stone soup…
Throw it in, she says. You feel sorry for it,
this pot you didn’t care to form well:
you make a silly joke,
ceremonious:
“Thank you for your service,” and then
let it drop. Plop! In it goes, like Bashō’s frog,
eager to return to its element. Or—no,
it had no volition; it fell like a wrapped
corpse off starboard, solemnly angled, helpless,
and lodged in the surface, confounded
by a fluid that hardened at its touch—then,
without a sound, turned on its side and sank,
not even a bubble
escorting it down.
Yolanda, encouraged (loss begets loss),
brings up a big coil pot that looks
like a fossilized beehive, and this makes
a proper thunk, sloshes,
throws up a bit of live slip, and burps
a few good-byes. Down it goes, presumably
sinking faster than the pinch-pot, though
who knows? You are left on dry land, on deck,
thinking of poor Gusev,
his body consigned
and slowing, moving more sideways than down:
except, in this ocean, all things—the man,
the sailcloth, the pilot fish, the shark—
are made of the medium that reclaims them,
their forms irretrievable out of themselves,
as if they’d never been: wet lumps in wetness,
drooling mass; tongues in mouths; spit in spit;
anagrams returned to the language.
