Author: Catherine White

We are in front of the kiln.

“We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.”
—Sandra Cisneros

The front of the kiln is bricked up. A propane burner is propped in the base for preheat. Now is the moment when we look around, sit back on our heels and think about the seeds of ideas that are planted in the pots that are slowly warming up in the kiln. I know a lot of my artist and potter friends have found it difficult to work during, first, the pandemic and now the demonstrations and unrest. It’s been an incredibly beautiful spring. We can write about the flowers in our gardens, the weeds that persist with tenacity, and the creativity displayed in the way that they spread. We can look at nature not just to seek respite from the psychic battlefield, but also as a means to continue.

HOW CAN BLACK PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT FLOWERS AT A TIME LIKE THIS

dear reader, with our heels digging into the good
mud at a swamp’s edge, you might tell me something
about the dandelion & how it is not a flower itself
but a plant made up of several small flowers at its crown
& lord knows I have been called by what I look like
more than I have been called by what I actually am &
I wish to return the favor for the purpose of this
exercise. which, too, is an attempt at fashioning
something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything
worthwhile of their burial. size me up & skip whatever semantics arrive
to the tongue first. say: that boy he look like a hollowed-out grandfather
clock. he look like a million-dollar god with a two-cent
heaven. like all it takes is one kiss & before morning,
you could scatter his whole mind across a field.

–Hanif Abdurraqib

Warren and I finished stacking our kiln this evening. I often refer to loading the kiln as being similar to doing a three dimensional puzzle. Making pots for that puzzle is both a joy and a knot of a problem. The kiln is an organic whale shape in which the pots sit in and on top of each other. Remembering the clues in order to have enough to fire the kiln is often a quandary. I remember the first time I took responsibility to fire the wood kiln I worked so hard that original effort is stored as a form of muscle memory.

I once had a helper ask me, “how do you plan for stacking this kiln.” I told her I make drawings and lists and then I dream about it. Sometimes planning for the firing feels like filling the inside of piano. At other times it’s more like shopping in a bodega. Today I felt like my whole body was in overdrive and I could not ascertain which direction or which object would solve the riddle of finishing the stack. Stacking our kiln is not a race, nor an equation or a formula. It comes together like a poem with balance, flow, and direction–a specific seasoning for this cycle of work. There are plenty of pots remaining, a good head start to firing a gas kiln in the near future.

THE PROBLEM

You are trying to solve a problem.
You’re almost certainly halfway done,
maybe more.

You take some salt, some alum,
and put it into the problem.
Its color goes from yellow to royal blue.

You tie a knot of royal blue into the problem,
as into a Peruvian quipu of colored string.

You enter the problem’s bodegas,
its flea markets, souks.
Amid the alleys of sponges and sweets,
of jewelry, spices, and hair combs,
you ponder which stall, which pumpkin or perfume, is yours.

You go inside the problem’s piano.
You choose three keys.
One surely must open the door of the problem,
if only you knew only this:
is the quandary edible or medical,
a problem of reason or grief?

It is looking back at you now
with the quizzical eyes of a young, bright dog.

Her whole body pitched for the fetch,
the dog wants to please.
If only she could ascertain which direction,
what object, which scent of riddle,
and if the problem is round or elliptical in its orbit,
and if it is measured in foot-pounds, memory, or meat.

–Jane Hirshfield

The kiln loading continued today. To be aesthetically effective requires a mix ranging from large sculptural vases to petite espresso cups. The resonance of each piece is different. Some are new and intriguing making me totally invested in seeing them fired to fruition. Other work has receded in immediacy so there is actually more freedom in the range of potential resolutions.

FOR WHAT BINDS US

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest-

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

–Jane Hirshfield, in Of Gravity & Angels, Wesleyan University Press, 1988

Warren and I have been quietly working in our cave of a kiln. We find we have a personal language we use when referring to pots. So we ask each other, “please pass me the boat, or the fish tail, or the trumpet.” Our verbal shorthand becomes a poetic language. We photograph our progress in stacking, but I realize all the ways it does not capture the rhythm of choices, the things we have learned, or the mistakes we might be making.

The poem that follows is based on a series of photos taken by the photographer Carrie Mae Weems. I found it is best when read aloud. The words work like an echo chamber and remind me that photography depends so much on the gaze of the artist. Both the photographer and the poet shift our gaze through text, color, repetition. Weems and ford remind us what has changed in our culture, what has yet to change, and what we hope to change.

from here i saw what happened and i cried

after Carrie Mae Weems

the blood is red the blues is red the blues
is blood the red is dirt the dirt is brown

the brown is red the dirt is blood the blood
is blues the blues is brown the brown is skin

the skin is blood the blood is kin the kin
is red the red is blood the blood is new

the new is skin the skin is news the news 
is brown the brown is noose the noose is red

the red is blues the blues is dirt the dirt
is skin the skin is blues the blues is kin

the kin is brown the brown is blood the blood
is news the news is black the black is new

the new is red the red is noose the noose
is black is blues is brown is red is blood—

— t’ai freedom ford, from & MORE BLACK, Augury Books

To fire a wood kiln one has to be resilient. It is not a matter of simply doing it over and over again. We have to lean towards the dreams that are held in our mind’s eye, to scratch and scratch at the itch of the embryonic ideas held in our imaginations. It’s through the tenacity of tree-like growth that we blend our dreams with our hands, the kiln, and clay.

We amass 400-500 raw pots and then spend several days placing them in the kiln. As each pot gets placed we are imagining how it might look after it shrinks and is licked by the flame and marked by the kiln’s atmosphere. Some pots are placed to block the the path of the flame so that it will turn or linger. We like to remember what we did in prior firings, trying to build on experience rather than insanely making the same mistake over and over again yet hoping for a new result.

Today as we chose the work for the back of the kiln and counted plates for the floor I had my moments of doubt. Do we have enough pots? Do we have too many pots. I have learned these are the questions I ask every time I fire.

OPTIMISM

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.

–Jane Hirshfield, in Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems

In a way many of my artist friends were prepared for a pandemic. They tend to prefer their studios to a more social life. When artists are at their best they look at the most difficult things in our society, digging to find an alternative way to navigate into current events. There are times when that digging feels like searching in our pockets for reading glasses, house keys, or a passport but at other times we find tears, meaning, and forgotten memories.

VEST

I put on again the vest of many pockets.

It is easy to forget
which holds the reading glasses,
which the small pen,
which the house keys,
the compass and whistle, the passport.

To forget at last for weeks
even the pocket holding the day
of digging a place for my sister’s ashes,
the one holding the day
where someone will soon enough put my own.

To misplace the pocket
of touching the walls at Auschwitz
would seem impossible.
It is not.

To misplace, for a decade,
the pocket of tears.

I rummage and rummage—
transfers
for Munich, for Melbourne,
to Oslo.
A receipt for a Singapore kopi.
A device holding music:
Bach, Garcia, Richter, Porter, Pärt.

A woman long dead now
gave me, when I told her I could not sing,
a kazoo.
Now in a pocket.

Somewhere, a pocket
holding a Steinway.
Somewhere, a pocket
holding a packet of salt.

Borgesian vest,
Oxford English Dictionary vest
with a magnifying glass
tucked inside one snapped-closed pocket,
Wikipedia vest, Rosetta vest,
Enigma vest of decoding,
how is it one person can carry
your weight for a lifetime,
one person
slip into your open arms for a lifetime?

Who was given the world,
and hunted for tissues, for chapstick.

–Jane Hirshfield, in Ledger, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020

A friend of mine took a photo of a bowl of clover. It was evidence of the day with her daughter who was making a meal for fairies. The image made me wistful for the days of fairies with my daughter. Days when we filled bowls with acorns, rocks, and memories. I know Covid-19 has been hard for families with children at home as well as difficult for those friends with parents in nursing homes or assisted living facilities.

I may ache to be with my daughter. I have fond memories of times in New York City, easy habits of riding the subway to Brooklyn, of drinking in the street life culture, of experiencing art in the museums, and of meals at new and old favorite restaurants. My daughter and I have tried to keep notes on the things we notice, feel, read, and cook during the pandemic. I draw the accumulations of things in bowls. One week it might be potatoes or peonies while for the next cycle it is strawberries.

Today I noticed Catalpa flowers strewn in the grass while I was out picking up sticks. I thought those would make a nice collection but they were past their prime. The pristine ones remaining were high on the trees way out of reach. I am wistful for cooking meals with friends and picking out bowls to serve from. But I also stop to ask when this is over and we look back at this time what will I be nostalgic for? The bowl of peas or the quiet dinners on the porch? Imaging things like this won’t make the loss of loved ones any easier, but it will help me fill my bowl.

THE BOWL

If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten.

If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.

If a shoe is put into the bowl,
the leather is chewed and chewed over,
a sentence that cannot be taken in or forgotten.

A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl.
Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness,
it eats them.

Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry.

The bowl cannot be thrown away.
It cannot be broken.

It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless,
and, big though it seems, fits exactly in two human hands.

Hands with ten fingers,
fifty-four bones,
capacities strange to us almost past measure.
Scented—as the curve of the bowl is—
with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.

–Jane Hirshfield, in Ledger, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020

Each Thursday Warren and I turn to each other and ask how did time run out of the week. I try not to listen to the news because I run out of tears. While the dish towel may run out of the ability to dry another plate, I stop to ask where did the idea of a plate come from? Was the first plate a hand, a rock or a leaf? As potters these are the questions that keep us going back to find answers that don’t exhaust the questions.

A WELL RUNS OUT OF THIRST

A well runs out of thirst
the way time runs out of a week,
the way a country runs out of its alphabet
or a tree runs out of its height.
The way a brown pelican
runs out of anchovy-glitter at darkfall.

A strange collusion,
the way a year runs out of its days
but turns into another,
the way a cotton towel’s compact
with pot and plate seems to run out of dryness
but in a few minutes finds more.

A person comes into the kitchen
to dry the hands, the face,
to stand on the lip of a question.

Around the face, the hands,
behind the shoulders,
yeasts, mountains, mosses multiply answers.

There are questions that never run out of questions,
answers that don’t exhaust answer.

Take this question the person stands asking:
a gate rusting open.
Yes stands on its left, no on its right,
two big planets of unpainted silence.

–Jane Hirshfield, from The Beauty, Alfred A. Knopf, 2015

This morning when I could do nothing else I took a photo of my morning coffee against a protest photo from the Washington Post. The sign in the foreground read “no justice no peace;” in the background loomed the Capital building. This evening as I lingered on the porch, the best seat in the house for breezes bringing some cooler air, I saw my first fireflies of the season. I wanted to ask them, how is your life?

TODAY, WHEN I COULD DO NOTHING

Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant.

It must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.

A morning paper is still an essential service.

I am not an essential service.

I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.

It must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.

Then across the laptop computer — warm —
then onto the back of a cushion.

Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.

Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?

It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through swiftness and air.

Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom—
how is your life, I wanted to ask.

I lifted it, took it outside.

This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.

–Jane Hirshfield, published March 23, 2020 in the San Francisco Chronicle