The origin of the plate.

Dream of the Origin of the Plate

Storm Scene
I and my brother dissolved in the storm.
We frolic in the dark element, celebrating the ambitious origin and the composite breath.
He multiplies and spreads through the multitude, I focus and linger on his forms.
We are space, we are dance.

Knowledge of the shore and of the people inhabiting it arises.

Harbor Scene
I approach my brother cast ashore as a multitude of fish.

Where will they eat you?
You are found by the people, blind to the seething ocean, a people living on the edge, waiting for an offering from their God and unwilling to step forward.
How will they butcher you, brother? How will they draw out your bile so that your taste does not burn their tongues or kill their children?
Let me be the plane on which they discover you, let me be the field where they sow your remains, let me take the weight of your flesh which they prepare to receive.

I become the harbor where my beloved is spread as the harvest of the sea.
I become red clay in the hands of the farmer, my song of love for my brother precedes the gift of Prometheus, tempering raw clay, conjuring its surface to become his bed.
I become the plates on which they serve my beloved.

Scene After the Feast
When the people finish the meal, they carry me, the plate, to the water from which we were born and wash us.
You return to the mother-ocean to sing of the people with their blindness and their babbling.
I become a mute towns-woman with the red skin of coarse ceramic.
I tell them what you are, immovably arriving beneath your remains, without a mouth to swallow you dissolved in the world for them and their dogs.

Decision

My brother with the tide continues to feed the people with tenderness, giving them the gifts of the sea.
I swell with anger in the kilns, hardening the earth.
From now on your body without a bed will not be called a feast.
For gods and for mortals, whatever the forest, the earth or the sea may send will be laid on the body of clay, once embraced by me.