Reaching into my clay
and gripping.
What I’ve seized upon forms
a ball, then a tube ridged
from where my fingers have dug in,
then it squirts away into nothing
because I’m strong enough,

but that leaves me with
an empty hand
and nothing with which
to work.

I wanted to make a bowl,
something to drink from;

the trick, I guess, is knowing how
to hold on enough
to shape the desired form
but not so tightly
that it disappears
from the effort.

It’s a trick
I’ve never learned.
I won’t learn it perfectly,
ever.  Too attached
to being right to know
better, even when I can
put knowing better
into words.

When you’re forever gripping your own clay
so tightly that you come up
with nothing but dregs on you palms, though,
yet claim that the air before you is now
a masterpiece,

I begin to see how to proceed,
and I let go…because

while there’s nothing I can make of myself
you’ll be unable to break,
nothing you’ll make of yourself
will actually hold the water
each of us needs to survive.

I start
by drawing a line around
the things I will address.

I stare a long time
into the nest of concerns
I’ve created.

When one leaps across the line
into what I’ve forbidden myself to consider,
I know what I must do,

and there I am in mid-air
dreading the landing
and hoping I will be brave enough

to follow it wherever it leads me.
It may be a slog through
filths and scums.  It may be

an orgy with undesirables.
It may be a red road of killing
and stench of fresh flesh torn open.

It may be a quiet road
with a fence and a family 
and a good dog at the end,

with a deadening blanket to lay upon
the very desire to be there at all.
It may simply kill me at first step,

candle me in a breath,
filet me at once.  Whatever it delivers
I shall accept, though not without

a longing look
back across the line
to the place I thought I should be

and a baleful glance ahead
at what I followed
to the place I actually belonged.