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Clay Man

Watch them form.

The tantalizing beads against their pale backdrop,

dancing as the moon reflects

and meets these beads.

Her hands, callused from the drying clay,

wipe them from his sculpted brows,

and she smiles.

Minerva herself would be tempted to bring him to life,

if only he were finished.

She cannot understand what it is her creation is missing,

why his body never hardens, why it still forms depressions,

where her sorrow can fill the mold.

The water that she used to mix her medium

is cloudy and quiet,

so you hear her pain behind the swirls of white and gray.

She sees the mass before her be replaced,

by something semi-solid,

staring back at the woman who made him.

She cannot wait there for the rest to become corporal.

To become real.

So she walks away in the hope he finally sets.

But she walks away too long

and the sun does what the moon could not.

She will never converse with her manifested mixture.

By the time she returns, he is old and dry.

And so is she.

The beads are well gone into his eyes,

his mouth shaped shut

with years of words both could never say.