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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4126 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Cave Women Nellie melba (Lorin Ford) It’s thirty years now since I made my terracotta woman, for therapy, I thought, from boredom. On a whim my fingers slipped in sweating clay, smoothed and shaped and kneaded through one slow November afternoon of waiting. I was pregnant with my son. The lump of clay took on the shape of pregnancy less from intent than lapse of attention. Her face was bland, generic, gazing down as if to study some thing in the hands that rested cupped at breast height: petal, feather or some image glimpsed in water she’d scooped up to drink from. I carved out the swell of her great belly for practical reasons: the weight of the thing, it would take too long to dry. Impatient, I wanted to see it fired. I glazed her cerulean blue. She knelt for years on shelves and tables. Sometimes a tea-light candle flickered shadows in the cavern of her womb and my son loved her. Still a child he stroked her smoothness, asked a hundred times if I had really made her, smiled with his secret. But she was crude, an amateur’s effort. In the end I threw her out, another piece of clutter, never thought of her again til now. A woman I’ve never seen, oceans away, in few words on the internet, said She’s made her first clay sculpture: a pregnant woman, womb agape with vacancy, same as mine. Symbolic? Skip the Freud. Last night and only half asleep I dreamed a better story: A woman squatted, far from here, way back along the bloodlines. Beneath the ragged opening of a cave she fed branches onto fire while others slept. Flame entranced the walls inside with dancing shadows, but she gazed out beyond the fire to the stars, the pulsing multitudes of lights that seemed to speak and ring in silver languages beyond her understanding. Next day she gathered clay and built her likeness – woman pregnant with belly cave – her sign to the speaking stars: Here’s shelter, safe as the home I’ve claimed on this escarpment. Come down. Here’s waiting this body’s self to bear ineffable presence. |
