Aug 2013
He saw in his mind’s eye her standing before the mug. In a craft show, on a stall: ceramics. It had a blue about it comforting as a still lake in remote mountains. The glaze had that quality that made you want to stretch your hand towards it, and if not pick it up and touch it entire, at least stroke it with the fingers, feel where the potter’s fingers had formed its shape on the wheel. Everything else on the stall was as nothing; only the mug held her gaze, her desire now to own it, to take its yet to be measured weight between both hands. Imagining breakfast and she would fill it with coffee and bring the hot, rich liquid to her lips: nature’s miracle of taste and aroma so necessary as the right start to any day of work or creative thought. She resolved not to look at the price as she had already decided to buy it come what may. It was beautiful and useful, and she told herself it would replace some mass-produced mug currently filling her kitchen cupboard, a mug that needed relegating to the next yard sale. Eventually, she dreamed, her cupboard would be full of such beautiful mugs she had thus found, thus chosen.
There was nothing here, he thought looking in his kitchen cupboard, that begins to hold a candle to such beauty – a couple of plain white utilitarian cups and saucers. No mugs to speak of. There was real coffee freshly brewing in a jug on the MFI table next to a sadly pink vase of flowers and ferns brought from a moorside garden – for her imagined visit. The dark colour of the coffee and its fragrant aroma (an added spoonful of expresso) formed, he mused, a temporary bridge over the always-distance of their separation. He wondered how his favourite Chinese poet Li Po would have fashioned a poem that spoke of such things: his loved-one far away over the mountains taking her first morning tea, still in her night gown her bare feet on the scrubbed wooden floor, poised before the day as a delicate flower nodding in the wind, the air sweet breathing through the open blinds, the dew sparkling still on the thin grass of her late summer garden.
And so, loving her beyond any measure, any reason, he writes:
*I am jealous of this blue mug
Taking such pleasure
In filling the shape
Of your quiet hand.
Afar, away, apart, beyond distance
I can only dream to drink
From the same rim that touches
Your perfect lips, your darting tongue.
There was nothing here, he thought looking in his kitchen cupboard, that begins to hold a candle to such beauty – a couple of plain white utilitarian cups and saucers. No mugs to speak of. There was real coffee freshly brewing in a jug on the MFI table next to a sadly pink vase of flowers and ferns brought from a moorside garden – for her imagined visit. The dark colour of the coffee and its fragrant aroma (an added spoonful of expresso) formed, he mused, a temporary bridge over the always-distance of their separation. He wondered how his favourite Chinese poet Li Po would have fashioned a poem that spoke of such things: his loved-one far away over the mountains taking her first morning tea, still in her night gown her bare feet on the scrubbed wooden floor, poised before the day as a delicate flower nodding in the wind, the air sweet breathing through the open blinds, the dew sparkling still on the thin grass of her late summer garden.
And so, loving her beyond any measure, any reason, he writes:
*I am jealous of this blue mug
Taking such pleasure
In filling the shape
Of your quiet hand.
Afar, away, apart, beyond distance
I can only dream to drink
From the same rim that touches
Your perfect lips, your darting tongue.
