Is It Beauty That We Owe?
To M
I stir a glass bottle filled with glass beads
and remember your lesson: to leave a flaw,
a bead to break the pattern, to free the maker.
Not an error but humility: We are not gods.
The last bead molded into a fist, a grit,
a clog that stops the machine: No tidy endings!
Wrong color, wrong shape, wrong size,
the last bead set like a door or a period
or the stone before the tomb’s mouth. Pattern
revealed as fraud and feint. I purposely
err, as you taught me, and choose
odd and ugly and unlike, and into every making
I weave fault: Erotic disruption or ember.