Old Fashioned Valentine for a Middle-Age Couple

Old Fashioned Valentine for a Middle-Age Couple

...for here there is no place

that does not see you.  You must change your life."

                                                                        Rainer Maria Rilke

                                                                        An Archaic Torso of Apollo

First poured it’s almost too much depending

on the clay and the length, of the way

the potter takes to shape the at first thin

as a finger and thumb opening.  The wheel

spins with the up and down pump, it speeds

and slows, it depends on the almost complete

control of the way the potter soaks

the mud and strokes the mold.  The studio

is the only alone they’ll know and be ok

touching, the cooling almost going (but not)

too cool, to a rise of heat and desire.  It’s years

now between each touch.  How first we

wandered out into the muck to dig up

the clay at the creek bed and stuck

our bare selves there with our tongues

on the roof of our mouths and our wooden

hods cinched to our ribs while we walked, out

of breath but glowing through the sheen

and patina, the mud streaked between

our knees and deeper.  And today, when

I think about the way we sliced all the way

down to the deepest spaces in between

while we made our own each other’s need, I see

the entire setting: plates and saucers,

mugs and soup bowls, all the while intending

and depending on table setting we

shaped at our own wheel.  And we stroked

the bowls open and we groped slowly

the thick pole the mug had begun as

and watched as every time in the beginning

it would collapse and we’d ball it again and again

and make it.  And eventually there’d be enough

for us:  mugs enough and plates enough and bowls.

Today it still holds, the one mug I’m lifting

to my lips.  You’re still asleep but something

in the heat, something in the kiln of want

we survived learning to recombine depending

on the piece, our own nervous or tired need

has glazed its way into this middle life of yours.

and mine.  Our touching has become less muddy

lately.  The heat is still being stoked below

and the clay banks we came away from

have grown over with trees and weeds

and decades worth of winter freeze and spring

ice outs.  When you wake today I’ll come to you

with a cup of coffee, hours ago brewed.  I’ll

cover the broken and exposed places on the rim

with my lip and we’ll pretend we’re smaller

now and just beginning.  We’ll drink, having

made it together, together.  Sweet.  With Ang-

ostura (a dash, and other) bitters