from In Praise of Hands

"Firmly planted. Not fallen from on high: sprung up from below.
Ocher, the color of burnt honey. The color of a sun buried a thousand
years ago and dug up only yesterday. Fresh green and orange stripes
running across its still-warm body. Cirlcles, Greek frets: scattered
traces of a lost alphabet? The belly of a woman heavy with child, the
neck of a bird. If you cover and uncover the mouth with the palm of
your hand, it answers you with a deep murmur, the sound of bubbling
water welling up from its depths, if you tap it's sides with you knuckles,
it gives a tinkling laughof little silver coins falling on stones. It has many
tongues; it speaks the language of clay and minerals, of air currents
flowing between canyon walls, of washerwomen as the scrub, of angry
skies, of rain. A vessel of baked clay: do not put it in a glass case alongside
rare precious objects. It would look quite out of place. Its beauty is
relatred to the liquidthat it contains and to the thirst that it quenches.
Its beauty is corporal: I see it, I touch it, I smell it, I hear it. If it is
empty, it must be filled; if it is full, it must be emptied. I take it by the
shaped handle as i would take a woman by the arm, I lift it up, I tip it
over a pitcher into which I pour milk or pulque - lunar liquids that open
and close the doors of dawn and dark, waking and sleeping.." Octavio Paz