When a 13th-century Chinese painter learned her husband was considering a second wife, she didn't argue. She didn't plead. Instead, she wrote a poem about clay, earth, and fire.
Guan Daosheng's poem — also called "Married Love" — is a 700-year-old meditation on what it means to become inseparable from another person, made from the simplest material imaginable. Two figures of clay, broken apart, mixed together, remoulded. The logic is so simple it's devastating: once you have been mixed with someone, you can never be entirely separated again.
A perfect poem to close a season about love. Not love as passion or longing or cosmic devotion — but love as irreversibility. As the thing that, once it happens, cannot be undone.
Song of Me and You
Guan Daosheng · China, 13th century
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