CRAFT FAIR

Here:

glass dragons on strings eggs in ancient patterns like things on the walls of caves bracelets of beads, leather and bone golden bowls like Midas-touched baths castles and apples on boxes and stools amphibians with golden crowns and sapphire eyes silken scarves twisting blue as the sea

You have come to this hall as you suppose, to purchase beauty: take it home in a paper bag to put in a cupboard or hang on a wall. But things here shift and hatch and grow, peck out of their crackled wax-dyed shells. Some things will never belong

Look: this retired art teacher in a long orange dress has painted appletrees on boxes, cottages and castles on chairs. Her shoes are silver slippers the color of her curling hair. She drinks water from a blue bottle as two whistling peasants pick ripe apples for the Queen.

Here all around you dolls with curious eyes peer out from behind their maker’s skirts, velvet frogs croak silently while above a giantess binds dragonflies with gossamer thread. And all along the pathways, echoing between the trees, voices fall and rise, accompanied by high thin whistles of small clay beasts and birds.

Here where the potter sits bowls and teapots sprout like weeds. His brown eyes vanish when he smiles at you. Earth is under his nails and in the patterns of his hands; as he turns the wheel the universe expands.