Is It Beauty That We Owe?

I stir a glass bottle filled with glass beads

and remember your lesson: to leave a flaw,

a bead to break the pattern, to free the maker.

Not an error but humility: We are not gods.

The last bead molded into a fist, a grit,

a clog that stops the machine: No tidy endings!

Wrong color, wrong shape, wrong size,

the last bead set like a door or a period

or the stone before the tomb’s mouth. Pattern

revealed as fraud and feint. I purposely

err, as you taught me, and choose

odd and ugly and unlike, and into every making

I weave fault: Erotic disruption or ember.