Archive for the ‘Kat Beyer’ Category
The Singing Bowl
Monday, February 4th, 2008
She’s dust and gone, but this remains: a smooth fine pot painted in her own fluid hand. Each little figure paces the circular path around the pot with her arms full, this one with minute wheat ears, each tiny grain outlined, that one with a lamb perfect to the last curl. And they sing, the words rising up from their mouths in little streams of letters we cannot translate though they look so familiar, an alphabet just round the corner from us.
They sing just on the edge of hearing. I thought I was going mad when I heard it, until I saw some children at the Museum listening, pressing their ears against the glass until the guard came and told them off.
I think she knew she would be dust. I mean, we all know it, but I think she really knew, and she knew a way around it, a way to put her voice in the clay more lasting than her perfect lines. But why? I believe that to anyone who listens, the answer is plain: she only wanted, long after her own mouth was stopped, to be heard just for a moment.
The tree on the shore
Monday, January 21st, 2008
A prince put an apple on the orchard wall by the river. He told the apple, “Wait here until I get back.”
He didn’t come back. A bird ate the apple and dropped a seed on the riverbank, where it did what seeds do best.
The third king of the Two Lands camped under the apple tree, on his way to a campaign in the East.
The Emperor of All Between the Rivers rode under the apple tree. He took one heavy, yellow apple in his heavy, ringed hand, and kept riding.
The twelfth Queen of the Three Oceans hung a target from the apple tree. The Queen hit the target, but an assassin had better aim.
A boat came down the river. A young woman stepped out of it and came to the dying tree.
She bowed to it.
“Thank you for waiting,” she said. She picked the last apple and ate it, swallowing one seed. She waited until she was sure. Then she said, “When you are born, we will come back here and plant a tree.”