Day 27--After David Hooker

After David Hooker

I am trying right now--
 this very syntax, these terms-- 
  to make a cup  

a stranger might put in his mouth
 the way I have put cups,
  have put art to my lips,
  
and the glazed lip of art on my tongue
 for mornings, for years.
  If this endeavor sounds strange,
  
imagine the shock when I damaged
 my back moving around my studio
   a few hundred tons of language like new clay.

Consider the loss when I broke to pieces
 and reclaimed the dust of twenty-three old psalms 
  with still water and refashioned them

as a letter to my congressman, a bulletin announcement 
 for church, and a song I sing my son at night.
  And the pain--you must know this--I endured

when in my own inattention to the natural
 signs of my materials, the vessel cracked
  of its own accord and I burned 

my hands with liquids so hot that I swore,
 in the name of art, never to try this again.

This is a number of months in the making, after I took students to David Hooker's ceramics studio last fall and they wrote poems in response to his work and his commentary about making art. In class, we called these poems, affectionately, our Hooker poems. For this we are truly ashamed. I urge you also to read David's blog and check out samples of his work.