(Wheel-thrown stoneware, Richard DeVore)
1.
If the lines are not lovely in two
dimensions,
they’ll never be lovely in three,
he said. The skirt will not hang right,
the actress
will stumble and blur.
And so my friend spent eighteen months
on the floor
with her scissors, through headache
and handcramp, recalcitrant muslins, and gavel-
to-gavel
coverage of the hearings that traced
a two-bit break-in straight
to the President’s
heart. Democracy, the hem
of your garment. We had not loved you half
so well
had we not loved ineptly.
Till hand could feel and eye behold
the seam
between pattern and in-the-round,
the lip, just blade upon blade of her shears,
converting
clutter to a world of grace.
And then she learned the damasks and silks.
And then
she learned to light them.
2.
The child does not walk at a year
and a half,
nor stand without prompting, nor
speak. The kindly professionals plot
a curve
that somehow will not rise as it should.
Please give, say the folding chairs,
give,
say the charts, please give oh give,
says the mother, a sign. The father
has not come
with her, this isn’t the business
he meant it to be. Please give, say the child’s
sweet shoulders,
a sign, and I will follow, I
will take the world for home.
Isn’t that
the story you want? Wheel-thrown,
light-sown, God the potter moves his
thumb,
and what was motion now is
flesh, and still the child
does not,
according to our lights, thrive.
Cortex, medulla, ligament, gut—
the least
conductive membrane with its world
of wit. How dull we are on this scale
and behind-
hand in our praise. Dear
boy, in all your palpable
beauty,
you will have to teach us something we
should long ago have known
by heart.
3.
In Norway he had worked with paint and
lathe
and leafing, artisanal
orders that had no real equiv-
alent
here, where they stole
his luggage and could or would not
say
what it was his mild young
wife was soon to be dead of. But life
was harsh
for so many back then.
He lettered signs and climbed
the steeple
with gold for the cross and once,
for Mrs. Potter-Palmer’s third-
floor staircase,
copied a panel of wallpaper lately
plundered from a French chateau.
And twice
on a Sunday (when else
could you paint the rotunda at Marshall
Field’s?
this was when people stayed home
after church) twice on a Sunday
he felt
the hand of God directly.
Scaffolding broke that first time and he fell
thirty feet
to be saved by shattering layers
of glass. Not a soul within ear-
shot and Lord
what a wreckage of three-button
gloves. The second time he lost an eye.
What I
remember is Oscar Nordby at eighty-
nine, rinsing his eye in an eyecup.
It must
have been—don’t you think so?—the good
eye, though from this distance I can’t
be sure.
The one was slightly yellow where the
white should be, and blue of course, and
the other,
glass. And always he knew
where the fault had lain.
Six days
labor and the seventh day rest,
to honor the father
who holds
a grudge. Eternity, the hem
of your garment. We had
not loved you
half so well had we not noted
what this grief is better than.
Do you see
where the glaze has roughened a bit
like human skin?
To honor
the father who made us.