I have the gift of boxes of my mother's poems. Some are more legible than others. Some are more meaningful than others, but their beauty speaks in specifics--an evening of rain, the celebration of her life entwined with my father's, her fears of what would happen to her books.
I use the poems as departure points for plates, writing words through red clay dust, printed onto a contrasting clay which even further distorts the language. Yet these words embedded in a plate, uttered in undertones, are gestures of memory.
What we are given in dreams we write as blue paint,
Or messages to the clouds.
At evening we wait for the rain to fall and the sky to clear.
Our words are words for the clay, uttered in undertones,
Our gestures salve for the wind.
We sit out on the earth and stretch our limbs,
Hoarding the little mounds of sorrow laid up in our hearts.
--Charles Wright, closing lines to "Homage to Paul Cézanne," The Southern Cross: Poems (Random House, 1981)
I use the poems as departure points for plates, writing words through red clay dust, printed onto a contrasting clay which even further distorts the language. Yet these words embedded in a plate, uttered in undertones, are gestures of memory.
What we are given in dreams we write as blue paint,Or messages to the clouds.
At evening we wait for the rain to fall and the sky to clear.
Our words are words for the clay, uttered in undertones,
Our gestures salve for the wind.
We sit out on the earth and stretch our limbs,
Hoarding the little mounds of sorrow laid up in our hearts.
--Charles Wright, closing lines to "Homage to Paul Cézanne," The Southern Cross: Poems (Random House, 1981)
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