Saturday, September 29, 2012

Jeremiah 18 (loosely modeled on "Einstein's Dreams", by A. Lightman)

The potter's hands curve smoothly around the wheel - the clay forms and reforms: dancers' legs, swans' beaks, and duck feathers get taken back to the mountain of gray that will become a glazed vase, to grace an aging dinner table.

The wood saw its master shrivel like a fig-leaf, but remembers when his face was round and purple, waiting to be squeezed like a fig into a virgin's mouth. The son's face is already yellow, burnt out from his days at the office. The yelllow girl beside him opens her legs at night, out of habit.

The table is bored: Their conversation is drier than the vase that rests upon his stomach. He likes the feel of her base, and the smooth crack on her left side.

The vase longs for the feel of water. Why didn't the yellow-man buy the fig-leaf (well, maybe she looks more like a branch) flowers? What could be more delicious than the rimming of rose-petals against her painted white - and why couldn't the potter have used eggshell?

The man takes a sip of his soup. "Delicious", he says.

The woman murmurs something he can not understand.

The potter sits in his workshop, wheeling his hands around the fresh clay. Will it be a dancer's legs, a swan's beak, or maybe even duck feathers? He's tired of white and grey: If it's a vase, he'll paint it egg-shell.

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