• #21 summer shards 2025

    All week I have been feeling the creep into full summer mode. We welcomed visitors to our home gallery and studio as the heat settled into the landscape. Our preparations will never be perfect, but our heart is in the right place. I tell visitors so many stories, about growing up in NYC, building the house, constructing the kiln, planting trees, and hosting our daughter’s wedding. Now, on this longest day of the year, we linger on the porch with our thoughts and memories drifting through the house.

    June

    summer creeps up the front steps
    and while I could never be perfectly made
    I feel my body drift through the house
    like a bride
    and for more than necessary
    I am faultless
    and beloved

    —Kate Baer, from How About Now, Harper Perennial, coming November 2025

  • #20 summer shards 2025

    Here are my first Dahlias mixed in with some feathery asparagus greens and a volunteer cardinal flower vine contrasted by the rough feeling of my escarpment vase. I replaced my garden fence this year and the white hydrangea is flourishing, as are my favorite daylilies. Don’t tell the deer, but they are thriving on this summer’s eve.

    Summer’s Eve

    For ES

    Here are the pink hydrangeas,
    In the neighbor’s garden.

    All spring we’d seen only
    White ones, & irises, beyond
    The picket fence. Now, on summer’s eve, as
    Tiger lilies come: this new thing.
    Just like you asked for.

    —Justin Belote, published in Afternoon Visitor, Issue 10

  • #19 summer shards 2025

    This morning I took my small, strong cup of coffee down to the dock and put my feet in the cool pond. I watched the sun come up over the trees. I may go back down as the light fades, if the bugs are not too intense, and as Ted Kooser suggests “to ride this day down into night,” to write in my notebook and “smooth the unreadable page with the pale ghost of my hand.” I so loved the images this poem constructed that I made a set of plates with dust prints of the text in 2018.

    A Happy Birthday

    This evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness. I could easily have switched on a lamp, but I wanted to ride this day down into night, to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

    —Ted Kooser, from Delights and Shadows, Copper Canyon Press

  • #18 summer shards 2025

    I pulled my garlic out of the garden yesterday. It is drying on old screens lined up on the porch, fists of flavor patiently waiting.

    The Garlic

    Rabbi of condiments,
    whose breath is a verb,
    wearing a thin beard
    and a white robe;
    you who are pale and small
    and shaped like a fist,
    a synagogue,
    bless our bitterness,
    transcend the kitchen
    to sweeten death—
    our wax in the flame
    and our seed in the bread.

    Now, my parents pray,
    my grandfather sits,
    my uncles fill
    my mouth with ashes.

    —Bert Meyers, from In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems, University of New Mexico Press, copyright © 2007 by Bert Meyers

  • #17 summer shards 2025

    Somehow I have missed the moon in this last cycle. It may have been due to lots of rain and cloudy skies. Or perhaps, the trees are so full and tall they have hidden my visible horizon. There is also the possibility of my own sheer exhaustion; I have forgotten to look. I am often thinking of the moon in my pots. I think of moons as many things. They might be moon jars or vases or boats. I call today’s pot a Moon Blade.

    Crescent

    Boat moon

    rows through

    ocean sky

    pulling us

    to sleep. We

    float up

    come morning.

    —Nupur Maskara, in West Trestle Review, 2024

  • #16 summer shards 2025

    I bought potatoes at the farmers market yesterday. Tangentially relevant to today’s poem, the woman who sold them to me farms in Warsaw, Virginia. The potatoes were so fresh it reminded me of my childhood summers when I was a young teenager and my parents rented a barn on the edge of a potato field in Long Island. Both my mom and dad had studio space and my brothers and I could walk to the beach or ride our bikes to see friends. I have great memories of walking along the edge of those fields. There were dirt bomb fights. We collected potato bugs and did stupid things with them. There were the potatoes one brother carved for an artist exhibition called “Food for Thought.” There was space among the potato plants to have my own private thoughts. We only had an outdoor shower and it looked out over the field. We often ate potatoes under the grape arbor. Actually, we ate all our meals under that grape arbor because it was the only place we all comfortably fit.

    The Simple Truth

    I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes, 
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
    and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. 

    Then I walked through the dried fields 

    on the edge of town. In middle June the light 

    hung on in the dark furrows at my feet, 

    and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds 

    were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers 

    squawking back and forth, the finches still darting 

    into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
    
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone 

    out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater
    and sunglasses
    praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables 

    at the road-side stand and urging me to taste 

    even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way, 

    she swore, from New Jersey. “Eat, eat” she said,
    
”Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.” 

    Some things 

    you know all your life. They are so simple and true
    
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, 

    they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, 

    the glass of water, the absence of light gathering 

    in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
    naked and alone, they must stand for themselves. 

    My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965 

    before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
    
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
    
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch 

    of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
    
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth 

    you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
    
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken, 

    made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
    
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

    —Philip Levine

  • #15 summer shards 2025

    May all of our spines be flowers.

    Pithos

    Climb
    into a jar
    and live
    for a while.

    Chill earth.
    No stars
    in this stone
    sky.

    You have ceased
    to ache.

    Your spine is
    a flower.

    —Rita Dove from Selected Poems, Vintage, 1993

  • #14 summer shards 2025

    I drew this morning in an incredible garden. I felt guilty that I was not at a demonstration. Every leaf, every flower, reminded me what it is to be alive, not to think, but to sprout, to feel, to search for a place, a bed, or the space between a rock and a hard place.

    Passage

    Every leaf that falls
    never stops falling. I once
    thought that leaves were leaves.
    Now I think they are feeling,
    in search of a place—
    someone’s hair, a park bench, a 
    finger. Isn’t that
    like us, going from place to
    place, looking to be alive?

    —Victoria Chang, “Passage” from The Trees Witness Everything, copyright © Copper Canyon Press, 2022.

  • #13 summer shards 2025

    When I am trying to name my pots I search the back of my mind for a shape association. It’s like trying to name an unresolved riddle that I can’t quite put my finger upon. When I began making these shapes I thought of them as caterpillars, reminiscent of a pot I made in the seventh grade. That was a time when I made things based on owls or hippos. These days I work more on the edge of meaning. I am coming to associate these forms with garden pods or turtle shells.

    William Kentridge:
    “The works by other artists that I keep coming back to have an unresolved riddle, or something at the edge of meaning you can’t quite put your finger on. I remember as a child in our house, there was a print of a Cézanne painting in the dining room with a line of paint on the side of a road, and I couldn’t tell — was that the edge of a drain coming into the road through the wall, or was it a person or a shadow of a person? The brain cannot stop trying to make sense of it.”

    William Kentridge Reflects on What It Means to Be a South African Artist, by Kate Guadagnino, excerpt from a New York Times article in T Magazine, June 9, 2025

  • #12 summer shards 2025

    Last night just before I wound down for bed I walked outside in search of the moon. I cheered on seeing fireflies. I studied our tall trees. My mind stretched beyond the fields. I noted the windows of our house, but no moon was yet visible.

    Standing outside
    staring at a tree
    gentles our eyes

    We cheer
    to see fireflies
    winking again

    Where have our friends been
    all the long hours?
    Minds stretching

    beyond the field
    become
    their own skies

    Windows   doors
    grow more
    important

    Look through a word
    swing that sentence
    wide open

    Kneeling outside
    to find
    sturdy green

    glistening blossoms
    under the breeze
    that carries us silently

    –Naomi Shihab Nye, excerpt from Every day as a wide field, every page