Rough Ideas

On the heels of Thanksgiving, December 1st has arrived. We have been sharing the kitchen with more cooks than is usual and cooking more pies than is typical. Obviously, we happily used lots more pottery as well. There is always an inherent pressure to do something special—experiment with a new recipe while ensuring there is more than enough. At the same time, there is the preference that pulls us to repeat what has become tradition. My daughter takes after her dad—she reads instructions carefully and creatively follows directions well. I am someone who believes in the paradoxical repetition of rituals to achieve transformation.

The practice of sharing the house with lots of family, a dog, and an extra cat can be tiring but also grounding. In our lives these days we can measure so many things. But we can’t measure the importance of rubbing shoulders, watching hundreds of ducks fly off the pond, the fictions our four-year-old grandson spins and the dances he creates. There are the frictions, hubbub, and silences of life that occur. These efforts feel both finite and infinite.

You always call it the same river, but the water’s never the same.
In a world where we can measure everything — or we think we can measure everything — how wonderful it is that you could have … poetry or music that actually makes you think you are touching infinity.

—Yo-Yo Ma in an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air

Today, I took a photo, read a few poems, walked this morning, and worked on a graphic story. Each effort had me thinking about balance. Today is the equinox. All week I have been shifting gears from summer mode into the autumn approach. The light has shifted, but here in Virginia the temperatures are still mild. I am transitioning from being focused on painted pages to making pots.

It has taken me a long time to come to love the autumn in this part of the world. It is slow and gentle. The colors in my garden are rich, filled with dahlias, zinnias, Mexican sage, pineapple sage, and sculptural overgrown okra. I remember when we had finally lived in this house long enough that the views from our windows were filled with autumn leaves. One might think of it as wearing the leaves like curtains. Some leaves are ready to fall, but I am glad that we have a long time before the bare branches take over our view. It’s still warm, but after dark we enjoy making a cup of tea.

Between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Today

I read a Korean poem
with the line “Today you are the youngest
you will ever be.” Today I am the oldest
I have been. Today we drink
buckwheat tea. Today I have heat
in my apartment. Today I think
about the word chada in Korean.
It means cold. It means to be filled with.
It means to kick. To wear. Today we’re worn.
Today you wear the cold. Your chilled skin.
My heart kicks on my skin. Someone said
winter has broken his windows. The heat inside
and the cold outside sent lightning across glass.
Today my heart wears you like curtains. Today
it fills with you. The window in my room
is full of leaves ready to fall. Chada, you say. It’s tea.
We drink. It is cold outside.

—Emily Jungmin Yoon, in A Cruelty Special to Our Species, The Ecco Press (HarperCollins Publishers)

In 2019 when I was teaching a class at Penland I put together an artist talk based on a quote from the painter Miro: I work like a gardener… Things come slowly… Things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. I must graft. I must water… Ripening goes on in my mind. So I’m always working at a great many things at the same time. This summer I revisited that quote in a poetic graphic memoir that I made in an online class taught by Kelcey Evrick.

The images in this series are collaged, painted paper using acrylic paint, watercolor, and acrylic markers. Kelcey led a wonderful group of creative and supportive women in this class.

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.

—Justin Belote, published in Afternoon Visitor, Issue 10

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

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

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

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

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