Category: rough ideas

Tonight, as we were saying goodbye at a weekend sale of paintings and other crafts I was introduced to another woman with the line, “do you know each other.” In fact, I did remember where and when we had met last fall and where she currently lives. These days my memory is like swiss cheese. I can be on solid ground remembering the names of esoteric Japanese potters and then I fall through a hole forgetting the name of my good friend’s daughter. But I also remember arguing with my mother in seventh grade when she would not let me go see the musical Hair. She said to me, “these are not the important things; you will not remember this.” But of course I do. Where now do I put this memory down, because of course she was right; it was not the important fact.

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.

–Anne Carson, from The Glass Essay; Whacher, (starting line 84) in “Glass, Irony, and God,” New Directions Press, 1995

My mother died twenty years ago this summer. She died of a heart attack in her sleep and it was a great shock. Later I came to understand it was a blessing due to her failing memory, but for months afterwards I wanted to hear from her in my dreams. When she finally appeared in a dream I was so excited I woke myself up. These days she comes to me in my dreams in her nightgown searching for candles in the loft on Sullivan Street. Or sometimes we are talking on my grandmother’s screened porch on Long Island. Last night I dreamt I was shopping for geraniums to put in her pocket to take on a plane to Heron Island in Maine. It was a hard task as the dead are difficult to shop for.

Marigold

I have the sun’s eye one minute—
the next, I’m going to bed with it.
Last night, I dreamed of rosemary,
for remembrance and for a baby

born to a woman who lived
in an apartment building. In the dream,
the dead and I said goodbye
at the door. I tried to buy a magazine

in a drugstore, but nothing was easy.
Nothing is easy when you’re shopping
for the dead. Maybe toys, I thought,
as I passed some boys playing

by the side of a road. Maybe a gold key
with which to open a coffin lid.
I woke to find none of the bodies inside
were alive outside the dream.

–Mary Jo Bang, The New Yorker, June 3, 2024, page 42

Over the last week as I drive and walk I see daylilys along the roadsides, in ditches, or garden beds. To me they signal summer. They also make me think of my mother. She liked to pick a single blossom and stick it in a cup. It seemed like a flower brought into the house created its own vibration. My mother taught me about the art of everyday things–the ritual of plates on the table, the flowers in the cup, a plant on the window sill, the child in the playground, quick words on a page, and always a sunset to be seen. All were part of the poetic correspondence of everyday things. The daylily was a thing to draw and a thing to celebrate.

I Wanted Music

I wanted music   yes

but I also wanted the music

of everyday things

a plate    an arm    some dirt     a chair

how a plant is related to a window

how a window is related to a chair

small words with purpose

correspondences

of everyday things

the music of combustible objects

one day ending

not tracking for posterity

but loosening like a fig


--Sarah Ruhl in Max Ritvo and Sarah Ruhl, Letters From Max: A Poet, A Teacher, A Friendship, Milkweed Editions, 2019

The air today felt like we were near the shore. It could have been Maine, California, or Long Island, New York. Warren and I went a mile down the road to share a meal with friends. Then we wandered out to their blueberry patch to pick at dusk. I felt a bit like Sal in the children’s book, Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey, by putting one berry in my bucket for every three that I ate while my friend focused on picking efficiently. It was fun to be the child.

“her mother walked slowly through the bushes, picking blueberries as she went and putting them in her pail. Little Sal struggled along behind, picking blueberries and eating every single one.”

–Robert McCloskey, from Blueberries for Sal, Viking Books, 1948

I remember putting a slide talk together for a workshop many years ago. It was like branches of ideas arrived in the form of images. As I worked from photographs of pots and the landscape the words arrived. After I presented the talk I felt like I had been summoned to put my current work where my words had been. I walked our property and gathered grasses. I worked from the specific blades, identifying species like deer tongue grasses and switch grass. These names began to feel like poems. The moment of describing the intimate studio efforts tied together the memory of my experience of painting in France with the current days of studying the view out the window in my Virginia workshop. I found myself translating the panes of glass framing tall grasses into poetic individual plates.

And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

–Pablo Neruda, excerpt from Poetry in “Neruda: Selected Poems,” Ecco, 1990

I am home to my own porch, trees, and garden. The car is still full of all the materials I took to teach a weekend workshop. I loved being in another garden and studio, with its own particular views, fences, light, and potential. Then it is always good to be home to rub my dog’s ears, to share dinner with Warren, and shoo a few deer away from the hydrangea at the corner of the garden.

I like to think that it is the poet’s
love of particulars,
the things of this world,
that lead to universals.

—Stanley Kunitz, in Conversations with Stanley Kunitz, edited by Kent Ljungquist, University Press of Mississippi, 2013, page 95

I am in Maryland this weekend teaching a workshop in a friends studio. We are making hand built pots and experimenting with materials. I told my students that as they pinch their pots they have to listen to the clay and imagine that their forms breathe. These pots speak of our time together in and amongst majestic beech oak and tulip trees

Poems are like trees…They let us breathe together. In each line break, caesura, and stanza, there’s a place for us to breathe. Not unlike a redwood forest or a line of crepe myrtles in an otherwise cement landscape, poems can be a place to stop and remember that we too are living. W.S. Merwin wrote in his poem “Place”: “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.” I think I would add that I would also like to write a poem. Maybe I’d even write a poem about a tree?

— Ada Limón, editor and introduction for You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, Milkweed Editions and the Library of Congress, 2024, page 3.

We have a few blueberry bushes. I planted the first ones the summer our daughter finished eighth grade. They have limped along, either being eaten by deer or shaded out—first by a white pine tree and then crowded by over eager forsythia. This week each morning when I take the dog out for her first spin I pick a handful of berries. Luna sniffs around the base of the bush in hopes I might have dropped some. I didn’t think I liked big high bush blueberries, but I love the moments of harvesting. I relish taking a photograph of them in a new small bowl or plate. It’s my personal blueberry holiday, a celebration of the mundane morning walk amidst the early days of June in Virginia.

As a beginning potter I made many covered jars. It seemed like part of the vocabulary of what a potter should create, but every jar once brought home to my parents lost its lid. It was as if my family did not understand the concept of enclosure. Sometimes I thought they looked better without their lids, so I took it as a criticism of my potting abilities.

As a kid I liked the idea of jars with labels. I liked the organization that it represented. The sugar was on the counter or the cookies were there for after school. But now as I make lidded jars I like their poetic potential. I have considered them capable of capturing tears. Our friend Mikio once told me he was going to keep secrets beneath his woodfired lid. The other day a friend stood in our kitchen and took the lid off of a soft gray jar. She was surprised by the bright yellow stash of my daily vitamins hidden inside. Once another friend brought a film maker for a visit and she made sure to point out the multi-sized jars on the wooden cabinet that stored the dog food, cat kibble, and rice. Loading the kiln several weeks ago the smallest lidded jar got tiny clay wads to keep the lid from sticking. My helper asked, “What are you going to use that for?” I told her it was to hold my wish for peace.

We drove west today through the rolling hills and over the mountains, past the Shenandoah’s Skyline Drive in a pea soup fog to help a friend brick up the door of his kiln. Once he tucked away the last of his work on the kiln shelves we talked about the history of our choices, the risks we take with material, and the imminent heat in the kiln. We have woven real connections through shared work and vision.

The Seven of Pentacles

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting, after the long season of tending and growth,
the harvest comes.

–Marge Piercy, in Critical Values, Vol 4, Issue 4, October 1, 2011, p 9