My pots are packed for New York City and were loaded into the car before the sunset. The low sun back lit the ornamental grasses in the front garden. The dusk swaddled the cattle across the street while Warren walked Luna along the road and around the pond. The night is a gift. I can sit down now that all the pots are wrapped.
December
The year dwindles and glows to December’s red jewel, my birth month.
The sky blushes, and lays its cheek on the sparkling fields.
Then dusk swaddles the cattle, their silhouettes simple as faith.
These nights are gifts, our hands unwrapping the darkness to see what we have.
The train rushes, ecstatic, to where you are, my bright star.
A year ago today we celebrated the life of Mikio Shinagawa. About ten years ago Mikio, Warren and I put together an exhibit of plates to commemorate our friendship and the many years of making pottery for Omen Azen in New York City. Mikio pushed Warren and I to give poetic names to our work. He wanted us to think of them relative to resonances, perhaps thunderstorms or ice, rather than being solely descriptive about the materials and process used. He wanted us to think of our pots like constellations–allusions with stories. Mikio’s most fervent wish for himself and others was to think of providing for the next generation.
Dead Stars
Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing. Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us. Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels so mute it’s almost in another year.
I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.
It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn some new constellations.
And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus, Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.
But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—
to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.
Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No. No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth, if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
–Ada Limón, From The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018)
My mother loved any kind of light and struggled in the the depth of the winter. She lived for sunsets and candlelight. She made a big effort with Christmas especially for the quality of light and for a generosity of spirit. She even loved the red lights of our car as we left after the holiday. Buying a tree in New York City involved a lot of schlepping and energy so my Dad often grumbled. He also really hated putting up the lights, so much so that when it became my job I was surprised by how easy it was.
Books were always a big part of our holiday. Before I was born Mom and Dad made a series of children’s books. My Mom wrote and illustrated and my Dad made the woodcuts, printed, and then bound the books. Those images are part of my December vocabulary.
A Christmas collaboration between my mother and father
I have been cleaning house and rearranging things so we can welcome Larkin–who is one and newly walking–safely and happily into our house. These cleaning and holiday efforts have me thinking about my Mom. She loved making the holidays special and she loved having it all seem like it was full of light and sparkle. However she also got stressed and exhausted. She had to read all the books she was giving away before they were wrapped. ( No small task.) She tried valiantly to clean up the house before her four children returned home.
I remember one year sitting down to dinner on Christmas Eve when we were all young adults. The tree was lit and decorated, candles were on the table and and before we dug into our meal she announced there is good news and bad news— we all got quiet and listened carefully. First the good news, “We have croissants for breakfast Christmas morning!” Then the bad news, “I dyed everyone’s underwear pink.”
Christmas “tree” in a bottle?
Spending the evening in candlelight, and maybe by the fire – with no TV – talking, telling stories, letting the lit-up world go by without us, expands the hours, and alters the thoughts and conversations we have.
I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.
–Jeanette Winterson, Why I Adore the Night, October 29, The Guardian
In 2018 I went to the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana as part of the Cultural Confluence Woodfire Conference. Each day Lindsay Oesterritter and I picked up trimmings from other participants’ projects and collaborated on making solid reversible forms to be fired in the wood kilns during the conference. Today, collecting Osage -oranges from our field I was reminded of the surface of one of the pieces that I kept from our series. Seeing the Osage-orange with this solid dish creates resonances of surface, density of form and depth of shadows.
To The Spiders of This Room
You who waited here before me in silence mothers of silence I always knew you were present whether or not I could see you in your gray clouds your high corners spinners of the depths of shadows…
