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Joseph Campbell
I see all love in lowly things,
No less than in the lusts of kings:
All beauty, shape and comeliness,
All valour, strength and gentleness,
All genius, wit and holiness.
Out of corruption comes the flower,
The corn is kindred with the clay;
The plough-hand is a hand of power,
Nobler than gold, brighter than day.
Then let the leper lift his head,
The cripple dance, the captive sing,
The beggar reap and eat his bread--
He is no baser than a king!
She took my strength by minutes,
She took my life by hours,
She drained me like a fevered moon
That saps the spinning world.
The days went by like shadows,
The minutes wheeled like stars.
She took the pity from my heart,
And made it into smiles.
She was a hunk of sculptor’s clay,
My secret thoughts were fingers:
They flew behind her pensive brow
And lined it deep with pain.
They set the lips, and sagged the cheeks,
And drooped the eye with sorrow.
My soul had entered in the clay,
Fighting like seven devils.
The shale and water thrown together so-so first of all,
Then a potter's hand on the wheel and his fingers shaping
the jug ; out of the mud a mouth and a handle ;
Slimpsy, loose and ready to fall at a touch, fire plays
on it, slow fire coaxing all the water out of the
shale mix.
Dipped in glaze more fire plays on it till a molasses lava
runs in waves, rises and retreats, a varnish of
volcanoes.
Take it now; out of mud now here is a mouth and
handle; out of this now mothers will pour milk
and maple syrup and cider, vinegar, apple juice,
and sorghum.
There is nothing proud about this ; only one out of
many ; the potter's wheel slings them out and the
fires harden them hours and hours thousands and
I eat clay again,
satisfied by that nothing
to the full,
that ugly child let in
at a back door.
Off the land
I have no name,
only the troubled dish
we all call home.
Click, clack says my walking stick,
& the soft buzz of a rattlesnake
shivers from the rock.
You go for water & bring back a strange new lover:
that’s how it is in the tales the old wives
used to roll between their palms.
One long noodle of clay made a bowl, a mirror
you could drink from. Coiling or uncoiling,
something always gets loose.
It’s true, i was careless,
that one i was always shadowing–that
little light of mine–it gave me
the slip one night.
I’d thought i could allow myself
one unguarded dream, woke
to the baying of dogs & the beating
of a hundred pairs of wings–pigeons
with their automatic laughter.
I had to go live among the graves,
where no one looks for a wife.
It’s been months now.
Years, even. Time again
when night turns the crests
of the mountains white
like the hands of God on the horizon,