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The crystal bowl encounters light as at the atomic level, where crystals form, a change as 'precipitate' as the way the writer's mother changed, presumably in death. The flavour of the peppermints inside recalls her laughter, lasting as the colours in Neith-Hotep's tomb frescoes, and the bowl becomes a canopic jar, which held the physical remnants of Egyptian dead, bringing longing for the lost one. The flavour of the mint dries on the tongue, so the longing becomes a 'thirsty' version of the coin placed under the tongue to pay the passage of Greek souls across the river of death.
(p. 63)
Malacca Bowlsi"We are Straits Chinese gone to the four winds--",Jan Owen,
single work poetry
(p. 63)
