Revisionist Poetry – Becoming Liminal – Clay Experiments, v.4

I knead until the room thins — the lamp a small moon,
my breath and the wheel keeping secret time.
Hands learn the clay’s grammar: press, fold, pull —
a slow conversation that erases the name of the day.

I am neither in nor out; I live in the seam,
the narrow seam where thinking loosens its teeth.
My fingers map a body I half-remember,
tracing valleys that echo some earlier dream.

The wheel hums a low, patient hymn; I move with it,
sensed more than decided. Ideas arrive like tides —
not commands but suggestions that the clay accepts.
I carve, and something in me answers by unblocking.

Edges I would have sharpened soften; plans dissolve
into the small exigencies of touch. Time blurs: the clock
becomes rumour, light a thin consistent wash.
I am folded into the making, an apprentice to silence.

When I press a thumb into a rim, I press a question;
the clay keeps it warm and waits. A ridge becomes a sentence
I never knew I could say aloud. My name falls away —
what remains is the work and the slow logic of my palms.

The kiln is a gate I cannot stand inside; I send the pieces through,
and in their absence the studio becomes an anteroom of memory.
Heat remakes what I handed over, and when they return
they wear their own histories: glaze like weather, crack like language.

At dusk I stand with clay under my nails and find myself
walking back into the world at half-volume, as if my voice
had been tempered in the fire. The pots hang on the wall,
small doors ajar. I read them like maps of thresholds.

I leave with the soft residue of the liminal clinging to my skin —
a salt of work and ritual that proves I was somewhere between.
Not lost, not found: I come back carrying the evidence
that making pulled me through the thin place where I become other.