My Cup

In front of me there is a cup. Like all cups, it is extremely interesting.

When I put my tongue on one part of it, it is cool and smooth. This is true of the next five parts of the cup I put my tongue on, but not the sixth, on the lip, which is cool but not smooth, because the cup is chipped there.

Descending from this chip is a thin black fissure. If the fissure was a stem, the negative space of the chip could be a flower, maybe a poppy. Across the cup from this fissure is a real (painted) flower. Unlike the flower made of empty space, the painted flower has petals (twenty), and leaves (two) sticking out of its stem. But the petals are like petals from a sunflower, and the leaves are like leaves from an oak tree, so maybe it is not any more real than the flower made of negative space. Besides that, all round the inside of the cup its glaze is cracked with a pattern like a cicada's wing. D'Arcy Thompson would enjoy the correspondence I am sure.

When I first found the cup, it was a pregnant woman, because it was half-full of clayish dirt. But actually I suppose the clayish dirt it was full of wouldn't grow up to be a cup like its mother, probably it was the wrong kind of clay, so the cup is specifically like Angrboda, or at least Pasiphae, or maybe Mary Theotokos, but I have to be careful there, because that might be a heresy (the implied Christology, I mean). My point is that mysteriousness of embryology is quite underrated. It is one of our wyrdest and most numinous sciences, so keep up the good work embryologists, ditto to the cup makers and buriers.

On the base of the cup the words "MADE IN AUSTRALIA" are printed. Google tells me the cup was made by "Johnson of Australia" in the "1970/80's" in "Croydon", "Victoria". I did not find the cup in Croydon, Victoria. I found it with a tree root growing through its handle, half-buried in the bank of the Karuah River, which is near Monkerai, which is near Bulahdelah, which Les Murray wrote a poem about once. If you want to make a pilgrimage to the exact location where I found the cup, the coordinates are 32°16'44.4"S, 151°50'56.4"E. Do be aware those coordinates fall on private property, and also I had a pretty good look to check if there were any other cups there and I couldn't find any, so if you are just looking to get your own cup, going there is probably not worth-while. I did meet some friendly cows though. Worth saying hi to them if you're in the area.

It's often a good idea to leave people wanting more, so I won't tell you any more about my cup at this time.