Rough Ideas

My mother loved the sunset. Often it felt like seeing the sunset with her was an emergency. Today marks not only the beginning of spring but also that day and night are equal. This morning I walked the dog and brought home a small bundle of the tiny yellow blossoms of spice bush. This afternoon I noticed my magnolia is blooming, the daffodils are glorious, the forsythia is doing its thing, and even our old sideways Redbud tree that came down in a February ice storm is trying to bloom. The news is terrible and our country may feel inhospitable right now and so each of these moments of beauty feel like an emergency.

“When we encounter a poem that is powerful, we are not the same when we leave it. The next time you take a walk, you are seeing the world through the lens of that poem. You are experiencing your relationship through that poem, reading the news through that poem, parenting your child through that poem.”

–Jessica Nordell talking with Maggie Smith, “Your Art is a Tool and Beauty is an Emergency,” in her 3/20/2025 newsletter on Substack

In the studio this afternoon the light was reflected by the snow. I wedged clay in a shaft of light. I rolled slabs and sifted white clay on my table and transcribed the poem A Dangerous Time through the dust. My words are messy, and when I press my wet clay into the dust it gets further abstracted. But the sentiment is clear. I want to flood the world with poems about how we might show up together. I made five deep bowls with the poem by Rosemerry Trommer printed backwards. The bowl/plates will warp and shift as they dry and are fired. They expand as I press them onto the table and they will contract as they dry. I am accepting of the distortion that happens through the process. These shapes become a safe place for love, for food.

A Dangerous Time

I think of the bones
of the unsung rib cage,
the way they protect
the heart. How bone,
too, is living, how it constantly
renews and remakes itself.
I think of how ribs engage
with other ribs
to expand, to contract,
and because they do
their solid work,
they allow the heart to float.
This is what I want to do:
to be a rib in this body
of our country,
to make a safe space for love.
There is so much now
that needs protection.
I want to be that flexible,
that committed to what’s vital,
that unwilling to yield.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Here it is, the solstice. The longest night of the year has arrived. Physics and astronomy can explain how and when this moment occurs. But for me it’s about the mystery and the marking of a subtle shift, the feeling of a pause before the increasing daylight clearly begins to shift the balance.

My Crow

A crow flew into the tree outside my window.
It was not Ted Hughes’s crow, or Galway’s crow.
Or Frost’s, Pasternak’s, or Lorca’s crow.
Or one of Homer’s crows, stuffed with gore,
after the battle. This was just a crow.
That never fit in anywhere in its life,
or did anything worth mentioning.
It sat there on the branch for a few minutes.
Then picked up and flew beautifully
out of my life.

–Raymond Carver, from In A Marine Light: Selected Poems

We left a friend’s house in the late afternoon grey skies. On the route home we always love the rolling hills and the endless apple orchard. Usually, I like to stop for a photograph. As I was contemplating where to stop a sky-filling burst of starlings seeded the sky. All I could do was wish I had wings.

To go in the dark

To go in the dark
with a light
is to know the light.

To know the dark,
go dark.

Go without sight,
and find that the dark,
too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet
and dark wings.

– Wendell Berry, in Terrapin: Poems by Wendell Berry

While photographing today I wondered if my pictures have been too grey. I felt as if the alphabet of imagery and inspiration in my landscape is lacking the darkness of crows amidst the bright witness of the moon. I was dreaming of the pop of color only a grocery store tulip could provide.

Why Are Your Poems So Dark?

Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

–Linda Pastan

As the third child in my family of four and the only girl I was labeled the cry baby. My older brothers worried … was I too sensitive to survive? But as an adult I practice saying what I really feel, experimenting with how to express it. I realize I was just frustrated by trying too hard. It wasn’t about being a girl, or being younger. It was about trusting my feelings and learning to express my own experience.

When i can't express
what i really feel
i practice feeling
what i can express
and none of it is equal

I know
but that's why mankind
alone among the animals
learns to cry

--Nikki Giovanni, excerpt from "Choices"

We are all weeds.

On a Pink Moon

I take out my anger
And lay its shadow

On the stone I rolled
Over what broke me.

I plant three seeds
As a spell. One

For what will grow
Like air around us,

One for what will
Nourish and feed,

One for what will
Cling and remind me–

We are the weeds.

–Ada Limon

I have been scrolling through a year’s worth of photos and paging through notebooks looking for images that spark not only time and place, but my hand, eye, and heart. I imagine each image to be a leaf falling from a tree. It’s as if I have been out after sunset with my headlamp looking for myself or the trail that we have traversed. The images are less a record of where we have been, but rather more what we have been noticing.

“and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

–Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Elizabeth Holland
from about January 20, 1856

Last night after sunset I called a friend. She commented on the moon rise. I had been pondering the last light in the western sky. I am glad she inspired me to look for the moon, which was almost full and reflected in the pond.

This morning when Warren and I returned from our morning walk the sky began to spit raindrops. Later, the light drizzle turned to snow flurries. I hunkered down with my last two years worth of notebooks, adding labels and revisiting their contents. The snow was picturesque and although I wanted to make paper cutouts of snow flakes I paged through the incompleteness of my sketchbooks.

The Wonder of the Imperfect

Nothing that I do is finished
so I keep returning to it
lured by the notion that I long
to see the whole of it at last
completed and estranged from me

but no the unfinished is what
I return to as it leads me on
I am made whole by what has just
escaped me as it always does
I am made of incompleteness
the words are not there in words

oh gossamer gossamer breath
moment daylight life untouchable
by no name with no beginning

what do we think we recognize

–W. S. Merwin, The Wonder of the Imperfect

As I walk I continue to pick up leaves and carry them home in my pockets. Their shapes inspire form and line, architecture and pattern. Their shadows might cross my face or heart. They might express the darkness of a crow’s wing or reveal history stored in the pockets of an old coat; saved shapes still holding hope. After I take each leaf out of my pocket I fold it into the pages of books like small boats who are keepers of memory, color, and contour; vessels that keep going.

I  wake  like  a  hand  on  a  handle.  Tomorrow 

Marches  on  the  old  walls,  and  there 

Is  my  coat  full  of  darkness  in  its  place 

On  the  door. 

Welcome  home, 

Memory. 

–W. S. Merwin, excerpt from Recognition, in The Moving Target, 1963
(Full poem at number 38)