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Zara
Raab Page 3
Meditation on a
Saucepan
Consider
saucepans––in particular
this
French one with its sturdy handle
and
rimmed
lid of hard metal sitting astride
the top,
tight fitting on the steamed milk or
clear
broth nesting in silky enamel:
Plato provides the archetype of it––
a pot’s
uses and form, its essentials.
Merely
incidental the round lentils
swimming
in the Miso or the marks
where
something once burned and now won’t
rub off–-
despite earnest and repeated scrubbings.
Plato’s
pot is not this one, mine,
fired lime
green
when made––a vessel, for Plato, as
ephemeral and unreal as this
suffering––
bound to
disappear—or nearly––in time––
the love lost becoming incidental
at last,
the beloved’s archetypal soul
becoming
solely, rightfully, his own,
my own
being essential to me alone,
though
markings may still darken both our
bowls.
Each dawn the clay vessels enter their kilns
to be
fired and re-fired for the day’s
work.
We let
sift down, down through the glowing
dark
all
else, the inessentials settling
into ash
at the bottom of the world.
published in The Carquinez Poetry Review, 2007
© Copyright,
2012,
Zara Raab. |