The Firing.

for Les Blakebrough and the memory of John Chappell 

by Gary Snyder 

Bitter blue fingers 

Winter nineteen sixty-three A.D. 

showa thirty-eight 

Over a low pine-covered splay of hills in Shiga 

West-south-west of the outlet of Lake Biwa 

Domura village set on sandy fans of the sweep 

and turn of a river 

Draining the rotten-granite hills up Shigaraki 

On a nineteen-fifty-seven Honda cycle model C 

Rode with some Yamanashi wine "St. Neige" 

Into the farmyard and the bellowing kiln. 

Les & John 

In ragged shirts and pants, dried slip 

Stuck to with pineneedle, pitch, 

dust, hair, woodchips; 

Sending the final slivers of yellowy pine 

Through peephole white blast glow 

No saggars tilting yet and segers bending 

neatly in a row-- 

Even their beards caked up with mud & soot 

Firing for fourteen hours. How does she go. 

Porcelain & stoneware: cheese dish. twenty cups. 

Tokuri. vases. black chawan 

Crosslegged rest on the dirt eye cockt to smoke-- 

The hands you layed on clay 

Kickwheeld, curling, 

creamed to the lip of nothing, 

And coaxt to a white dancing heat that day 

Will linger centuries in these towns and loams 

And speak to men or beasts 

When Japanese and English 

Are dead tongues.