Rough Ideas

This evening we watched the sunset, our eyes lingering on the field’s green edge. The conversation wandered and there were moments when each of us felt like stray cats, eyes bright as if we had said too much about the neighborhood or our deeply held emotions. But we turn and look again at the abundant green and feel lucky for where we have all landed.

Now, we take the moon
into the middle of our brains

so we look like roadside stray cats
with bright flashlight-white eyes

in our faces, but no real ideas
of when or where to run.

We linger on the field’s green edge
and say, Someday son, none of this

will be yours. Miracles are all around.
We’re not so much homeless

as we are home free, penny-poor,
but plenty lucky for love and leaves

that keep breaking the fall….

–Ada Limon, from We Are Surprised in Bright Dead Things, Milkweed Press, 2015

Recently the poet laureate Ada Limon was requested by NASA to write a poem to be etched on the outside of a spacecraft named Europa Clipper, partly named after one of Jupiter’s moons to which it will travel on an almost two billion mile journey. The poem and spacecraft will not reach its destination until 2030, six years after its launch. I often think that potters have to see into the future. We have to imagine how our pots will shrink and transform in the heat and accept the surface changes and color shifts– but the idea of peering six years into the future is a whole other realm.

There are pots I inscribe with poems, often poems my mother wrote twenty-plus years ago. These poems are usually printed and appear backwards in my loopy handwriting. Or sometimes I inscribe directly on the surface with a loose touch. I want my words to be abstracted. I expect the observer/user knows there is hidden meaning. I hope the illegibility adds to the wonder as if small invisible words on a moon shaped vase call out into the dark. I read that Ada Limon practiced writing her poem by hand nineteen times until she got it right so that NASA could transcribe her actual handwriting onto the vessel. I still wonder how it will be transformed as it moves through the atmosphere, through the heat , cold, and time of space travel. Perhaps only a slight poetic variation from the heat, space and time of a kiln.

Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.

--Ada Limon, In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa, requested by NASA; to be engraved on the side of the Europa Clipper on its mission to Jupiter

I did a drive today I have done many times over the last thirty years. I always notice new buildings, dirt piles, and traffic changes. But today I recalled all the times I have driven north across the Potomac River at Point of Rocks just as the leaves unfurled and a green skin grows over the changes in the landscape. Home again to walk the dog, admire the weedy garden, bring a few things into the studio where I have a hand painted sign that reminds me to “keep going” — and yes I’ll take it all.

When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

–Ada Limon, from Instructions On Not Giving Up in Poem-a-Day, 5/15/2017

In late winter we cut down a big mulberry tree at the back, north side of our house. It had gotten too big for its spot. Shading the deck and dropping mulberries all over, making a big mess, it attracted wildlife, lots of wildlife. I could live with the deer and the birds and the squirrels. But it was more alarming when I saw a bear out the back door with a cub. However, what pushed me over the edge last summer was when we routinely had a skunk off the back deck eating mulberries. My young impulsive dog was sure to get skunked before long.

A few years ago I asked our tree arborist about cutting it down but he persuaded us that too much wildlife depends on the tree. I lived with the tree for a few more years as it cast ever more shade and dropped more berries until the skunks rejoiced. I feel slightly guilty that I got someone else to cut it down, but they could remove it, a task beyond us these days. Today I walked around our property identifying which of our other mulberries bear fruit and which ones are males without fruit, relearning the fact that not all mulberries bear fruit. I said hello to groundhogs, squirrels, a young buck with fuzzy nubs of horns, and listened to the birds. I feel better now having relearned the habits of the mulberries. When I surprised the buck in multiple locations he looked up as if to say you caught me purple-mouthed. A nice variation on the old phrase caught red-handed as if smeared with guilt in the act of stealing delicious fruit. Now that I investigate the trees further from house and garden I am happy to share.

Purple-Handed

Which the phrase red-handed, meaning caught in the act, meaning smeared with guilt, out out damned spot, is a bastardization of, given as purple-handed is the result, this time of year, of harvesting mulberries, which Aesop’s ant might do with freezer bags or Tupperware, but, being sometimes a grasshopper, I do with my mouth, for that is one of the ways I adore the world, camped out like this beneath my favorite mulberry on cemetery road, aka Elm Street, aka, as of today, Mulberry Street, the wheel of my bike still spinning, as the pendulous black berries almost drop into my hands, smearing them purple and sweet, guilty as charged.

–Ross Gay, in The Book of Delights, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2019, page 215.

It’s the first of June, the beginning of my seasonal project until the 21st. I have been toying with a new series name and have tentatively settled on the name summer shards. I like the alliteration and the ceramic association. I also often use poem fragments, broken from the whole. If someone concocts a better name there’s a free cup awaiting.

Who

These lines are written
by an animal, an angel,
a stranger sitting in my chair;
by someone who already knows
how to live without trouble
among books, and pots and pans . . .

Who is it who asks me to find
language for the sound
a sheep’s hoof makes when it strikes
a stone? and who speaks
the words which are my food?

–Jane Kenyon

I write and draw pages in my sketchbooks and they outline the substance of our lives. They mark the cups of coffee and spring noodle bowls, summer oysters, the fall Osage Orange collections, and the winter dried flowers. My words document hopes and fears, memories and dreams. They are carved from the habits of our lives and minor deviations in routines. I am working towards firing the wood kiln, soaking peas to plant in the garden, drawing on a new backdrop for a photo to mark the equinox. Each week I try to take at least one photo with the good camera. Everyday phone photos provide a chronology, a tangible record of daily actions. Quick images transform impulse into a visual language which helps to articulate the nameless inspiration so it can be further shaped.

“… poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

–Audre Lorde