Overcut cased water-jug, wheeled edge to edge

It begins colorless and hot, a plain gather blown to shape, then sleeved in emerald while the wall still holds the fire of the pot—the darker skin laid over the clear so the two cool as one. After that the wheel takes it, and the wheel is patient. Every band you see is that green ground away to reach the water-white beneath: the central column of oval lens punties opened through the casing, the wall-to-wall diamond diapering, the long flute panels, the serrated fan at the lip, and, because someone would not stop, the handle faceted too, so the thumb meets a field of little cut lozenges no thumb has ever asked for. I will grant the hand its due—cutting back to lenses this even, this deep, without splitting the body is high, unforgiving work, and the man at the wheel knows it (he leans the way they all lean, close to the smell of the abrasive). It is the manner the Bohemian flashers taught the seaboard, laid over the diamond fields the Anglo-Irish houses had long made a byword for prosperity.

And there is the tell. Not one square inch is left plain, and the reason is not the eye but the nerve. A vessel that carries water to a table is afraid of being only that, so it buries itself until burial passes for rank—no interval of quiet emerald allowed simply to be looked at, only more hours pressed edge to edge, as though enough subtraction could add up to distinction. It cannot. Density is what form reaches for when form has nothing to say; a hundred thousand cuts do not make a treasure, they confess a jug that could not bear to be recognized. The green is genuinely lovely where the lenses open it to the light, and I have declined to be moved by it before. Fine, and recent, and the sawn rim already softening at one tooth where a mouth or a shelf found it. Someone will pour from it once, set it back, and mistake the labor for the worth—and the labor, having done all it knew how, will still not answer for what the thing is for. — QK