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The Pinch Pot
Thomas R. Smith

Anya sent me a hand-molded bowl, one of two she’d been given as a girl by our dear late friend Robin when we all lived on the farm. The clay is earth-toned, heavy, with dark brown glaze dripped around the rim and a wash of ochre inside. It’s not formed on a wheel but by the steady work of fingers pinching it into shape and thickness, four round imprints Robin poked with a fingertip into the bottom of the bowl a more palpable signature than her name in airy lower-case on the underside.
It’s student work, funky, homespun and sweet, a treasure I’m glad to possess after all these years. God, how I loved that woman! With her Vivien Leigh good looks, mass of curling dark hair and melodic Florida accent, she was exotic, and I could hardly believe my luck sharing her bed in that upstairs room looking out on the fields. So enamored with her in fact that when she returned south the next year I followed, only to finally lose her. It’s a long story, a painful one I don’t want to tell, and ultimately a common one with the young whose paths cross on the road to who they really are.
Maybe twenty-five years ago Robin wrote to say that a song she’d heard on the radio reminded her of me. I wrote back, but never heard from her again. By then she’d become Guru Ravi Kaur Khalsa, a yoga instructor in the Bhajan Sikh community. By then I could bless the changes that had taken her from me into the radiant fulfillment in which her life climaxed. But her earlier, searching self is the one still most real to me, who lives on in me, her moment of “glory in the flower” manifested in this beginner’s pot.
Anya still remembers us all together with fondness, our little transient household, she, her sister Kirsten, their mom Margaret, Robin, and me, the adults apparently a somewhat stable presence, though the going was anything but smooth in that time of upheaval and confusion. Dear Robin, you’ve never been far from me. I cradle in my elder hands this bowl formed by your young ones, and sense something of the roundness of time that keeps circling us back to each other, none of our love wasted or thrown away, only our earth reshaped and our words pinched into new containers for what we feel.

i.m. Robin Neyman (Guru Ravi Kaur Khalsa), 1950-2011

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Thomas R. Smith is a poet, essayist, editor, and teacher living in western Wisconsin. He is the author of ten volumes of poetry, most recently Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications), and has edited several books as well including Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer (Graywolf Press). His first prose work, Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press), seeks to join imagination and activism in the nature poem.

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