At sundown, after many trips back and forth, from house to studio in the damp landscape, it feels like all my words have gathered at the foot of the trees in silence.
To a Leaf Falling in Winter
At sundown when a day’s words have gathered at the feet of the trees lining up in silence to enter the long corridors of the roots into which they pass one by one thinking that they remember the place as they feel themselves climbing away from their only sound while they are being forgotten by their bright circumstances they rise through all of the rings listening again afterward as they listened once and they come to where the leaves used to live during their lives but have gone now and they too take the next step beyond the reach of meaning
—W.S. Merwin, in “Present Company,” Copper Canyon Press, 2005
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.
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.
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.
