Crackleware — pottery with a deliberately induced network of fine cracks in the glaze — appears in poems about deliberate imperfection and the beauty of controlled damage; Chinese Guan and Ge wares, with their famous crackle glazes, inspired Song dynasty poets who praised the cracks as "ice breaking on a river in spring"; A poem about grief might use crackleware as its central image: "still whole, still useful, only the surface tells what it has been through — a map of where the heat went in"; The deliberate quality of crackle — the potter choosing to crack what they might have kept smooth — suits poems about the conscious embrace of vulnerability; In a ekphrastic poem about a museum collection, a crackleware vase invites a meditation on time: "the cracks came all at once, at the moment of cooling — a whole biography written in an instant"; John Ashbery's interest in surfaces that reveal their own making finds an analogue in crackleware: the glaze that shows, in its fracturing, the stress it survived.