High Watermark Salo[o]n: Teppich's Stone

She carves everything: clay, cement, paper.
Charcoal or drill, she's working a groove. 

I never really understood alabaster
until I saw how she'd tooled it: gorges 

in the center of a stone hive, or gills
in rock's underbelly. Labial. Luxurious. 

Now, I've walked woods with the finest
mycologists and never relished 

the fungal form, until I watched her furrow
clay the way a wind-blown spore 

germinates on contact with free-living
algae. We can't help being biomorphic. 

Even our geometry and metallurgy  
can carry us right back to ancient stinkhorns 

or corn smut. The story of a hypha is
the story of an artist's hand - a reach, 

a filament in a vast firmament. A network
of fruiting bodies awaiting shamans. 

If my rock climber's grip could see in a cliff
what her pneumatic chisel calls forth, 

would my two-fingered clutch ever carve
(with its adrenalin rush) such limber curves.