An unpainted
treasure chest
with the initials
"LP"
No glaze.
--Takes me back to the days
when I made her.
8th grade and I was no
art major.
-But I made her.

Bland, against a white wall.
Unnoticed
among them all.
There's a lid
and a box
but no key
and no lock
there's no way to keep shut
or keep out what I shouldn't trust.

Unpainted, unglazed, just burned.
What a haze.
While I move
to another room,
another wall,
it changes all.

Now white can stand out.
And it won't ever blend in.
Not unless it's put against
a white wall again.

Down through the ancient Strand
The spirit of October, mild and boon
And sauntering, takes his way
This golden end of afternoon,
As though the corn stood yellow in all the land,
And the ripe apples dropped to the harvest-moon.

Lo! the round sun, half-down the western *****--
Seen as along an unglazed telescope--
Lingers and lolls, loth to be done with day:
Gifting the long, lean, lanky street
And its abounding confluences of being
With aspects generous and bland;
Making a thousand harnesses to shine
As with new ore from some enchanted mine,
And every horse's coat so full of sheen
He looks new-tailored, and every 'bus feels clean,
And never a hansom but is worth the feeing;
And every jeweller within the pale
Offers a real Arabian Night for sale;
And even the roar
Of the strong streams of toil, that pause and pour
Eastward and westward, sounds suffused--
Seems as it were bemused
And blurred, and like the speech
Of lazy seas on a lotus-haunted beach--
With this enchanted lustrousness,
This mellow magic, that (as a man's caress
Brings back to some faded face, beloved before,
A heavenly shadow of the grace it wore
Ere the poor eyes were minded to beseech)
Old things transfigures, and you hail and bless
Their looks of long-lapsed loveliness once more:
Till Clement's, angular and cold and staid,
Gleams forth in glamour's very stuffs arrayed;
And Bride's, her aery, unsubstantial charm
Through flight on flight of springing, soaring stone
Grown flushed and warm,
Laughs into life full-mooded and fresh-blown;
And the high majesty of Paul's
Uplifts a voice of living light, and calls--
Calls to his millions to behold and see
How goodly this his London Town can be!

For earth and sky and air
Are golden everywhere,
And golden with a gold so suave and fine
The looking on it lifts the heart like wine.
Trafalgar Square
(The fountains volleying golden glaze)
Shines like an angel-market.  High aloft
Over his couchant Lions, in a haze
Shimmering and bland and soft,
A dust of chrysoprase,
Our Sailor takes the golden gaze
Of the saluting sun, and flames superb,
As once he flamed it on his ocean round.
The dingy dreariness of the picture-place,
Turned very nearly bright,
Takes on a luminous transiency of grace,
And shows no more a scandal to the ground.
The very blind man pottering on the kerb,
Among the posies and the ostrich feathers
And the rude voices touched with all the weathers
Of the long, varying year,
Shares in the universal alms of light.
The windows, with their fleeting, flickering fires,
The height and spread of frontage shining sheer,
The quiring signs, the rejoicing roofs and spires--
'Tis El Dorado--El Dorado plain,
The Golden City!  And when a girl goes by,
Look! as she turns her glancing head,
A call of gold is floated from her ear!
Golden, all golden!  In a golden glory,
Long-lapsing down a golden coasted sky,
The day, not dies but, seems
Dispersed in wafts and drifts of gold, and shed
Upon a past of golden song and story
And memories of gold and golden dreams.

I am hopelessly muddled
by the unglazed
remembrances of you
that have been scattered all over
in an already mazed
world
and I am on the ground
whirled

lay it in the heart(h)
and
watch with unglazed eyes.

see the blaze play its part.

as it consumes all to ashes
before it
reluctantly wanes and dies.

I remember as thought it were today, the morning we moved to Cedar Rapids. The funeral day was clear and dry: a frosty autumn morning. My mother was crying.

Behind my closed, damp eyelids, I faced a terrible, inexplicable heartache. I wanted to forget everything we did together. We used to spin pottery, him sitting behind me, guiding my childishly clumsy fingers.

I picture vividly, to the point of tasting, the cold, dry smell of wet clay, and the chalky scrape of an unglazed ***. I kept one on my desk until we got settled.

I threw it into the ravine behind the new old house when I couldn't break the frosted ground for a burial. I cried, drinking in the beauty and stillness of the grey. My breath mingled with the fog.

lathe and plaster walls
divide a derelict

rooms part at doors,
holes
kicked through
and, unglazed frames.
light lingers on fragments
of lyric and latex.

rats scramble away
from nests;
domesticity.
after
bank's dead hand
slapped us
outta the place.

My face
Stole the skin of a diamond
To tote as it’s own mask of
Sheepskin.
Me, being the ever-ovulating orchestrator
Needed to pin the tail on this donkey
Only to rationalize why it is
Only in our nature to scrutinize
Our flaws, like a jeweler.
Each facet is forced to plead their case
While in the back of their mind’s eye
They know they will only be allowed on probation
Until the abuse from the lapidary starts again.
Tell me I’m not a real diamond
But then have the courtesy
To shatter me
Back into young, unglazed sand