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Over the mountains from Kyoto, the potter gathers pine to feed the flames that raise the heat in the kilns of Shigaraki.
Inside the furnace hot ash swirls around me and clings to my body. At night village lights are dark but the moon and fire still glow.
I am rust-coloured, there is iron in my clay. Ash, quartz and feldspar make a landscape on my skin recalling the granite hills.
Moss-covered lanterns light the path of stepping stones: a bridge from city to the world of the tea-room, its single flower and scroll.
Bending low, the guests enter through a small square door. The tea-master pours. Now they cup me in their hands, lift me to their lips and drink.
It’s true you also see lights shimmering when you come by plane but it all happens too quickly; when you arrive by sea the land comes out to meet you, you wait behind a rope until it’s safe to get off, in a space between being and not being somewhere. Someone will be there to greet you, they’ll have a sign so you know who it is before they know you. Others will be arriving too and on the boat you’ll have tried to guess who they are but not really wanting to talk to them, not yet, and then you see who’s waiting for you and when you hear his voice you recognise the accent and you’re lost because it takes you back years - he’s tall with that slight stoop but it’s the voice that does it.
This will be the first of many times you come to the island, you begin to think of buying a house here and almost at the point of agreeing a price you start to wonder what it would be like in winter and who your friends would be and could you live in such a small place, even though you’ve begun to speak the language, when people don’t feel the same way. It might be better to leave by plane - if you leave by boat the people on the quay shrink until they disappear.
He gave the wrong kind of look one newspaper said. Like his father, a builder, he used to make things. Perhaps he might have been a carpenter loving the smell of sawdust and the keen precision of mitred joints. He could have taken pleasure in dovetail nailing or how to make a rebate for a pane of glass. The lexicon of mortise and tenon and sizing up the direction of the grain would have become second nature in time like Lu Ban the Chinese master who made the kite, a cloud ladder and a bird.
The poet came from a dry place. He drank glass after glass of water when he read in his native tongue, knowing he must return to where flesh dries out like fruit.
I thought of the way water splashes, the trill it makes in a metal cup, or how it ploughs a path in dust when it spurts from a broken pipe.
I will remember that when I am thirsty.
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