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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
