This was made by a most skillful maker:
the ease of the pattern’s recurrence is noble,
so is the curve of the whole, and the colors,
the soft yellow-brown and the warm brown.
Yet in the way that it sits, I see something
imperfect, expectant, immediate,
alert, like a bird with its head cocked.
It grew into being. Its stillness remembers
the tug of the living reed-root in the current.
The humor of pliable, sensitive
fingers is here in the weave of the fernstems,
the even/uneven rhythm of lifework.
And this is what’s missing, my heart says, what’s missing.