The Way of Tea in the Time of the Virus (Ring)

I want to know

what is promised

in ceremony.

      The quiet stamina 

      of the wrist.

      The static curl   

       of the whisk’s wood fringe.

      Still green 

      become froth.

And in the dilations

of time

I want

to feel mortality

bloom

out of itself—

               understand 

               what that means.

Find death

on the ground, pick it up,

turn it over 

in my palm

like a smooth stone.

To know how

to moment—

      The scoop and the sift.

      The invisible rites.

      Measure for each task.

      The way hands fold, curl, grip.

            Now cupping a bowl,

            the lovely ancestral

            curve of its lip.

And always

the magnificence            

of pour

Camila Ring is a PhD candidate in English at Case Western Reserve University. Her research focuses on theology and embodied religious poetics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. Her poems have been published in Equinox, BathHouse, and Think Magazine.