The moon is a waning crescent. The skies have been overcast the last couple of nights. Now the fog is floating in, so there are few stars. The kiln is hot and we have been tending, feeding, listening. It is almost as if firing a kiln was like eating stars, hot and peppery, full of patience and anticipation. We stoke, chat, eat, sleep, drink lots of water, and talk about what we get to eat next. More stars, cake? We watch the flame move through the space of the kiln. We look at the ceramic cones (that indicate temperature) and record the pyrometer temperature. At night the flame reaches out of the chimney like a bright mist or tongue.
ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
–Rebecca Elson