Rough Ideas

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

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.

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

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

When I began doing these seasonal series I used the alphabet and bits from my childhood dictionary as prompts to create collaged images. So, it’s no wonder that I was drawn to a project that Alex Dimtrov did in 2012 where he posed 26 questions, one for each letter of the alphabet. His goal was to write poems that were portraits of people he did not know. But instead of poems he made collages. He also read more than he wrote. I similarly give myself assignments as a way to keep going, to keep asking questions, to keep putting things in my pots, and to keep taking photos.

Poem for the Reader

Since we’ll likely never be together
anywhere but here — what season
are you most alive in?
Is the morning blue or green?
How would you use freedom?
What part of your body do you trust the least?
Permanent rain or never-ending snow?
When are your most difficult hours?
Would you want to know who you were
before this? Why or why not?
And now that there’s fire —
the bridge or the river?
More money or love?
Do you sometimes avoid happiness?
If asked, would you return?
To Earth or anywhere else?

–Alex Dimitrov, on his Substack, The Reader

I did an online yoga class this morning. The teacher is the sister of an old friend. I enjoyed her view into familiar poses. As we balanced in tree pose I studied my back deck and the beech tree beyond. I noticed not only the marigolds in my outdoor pots, but a crow balanced in a branch.

My Crow

A crow flew into the tree outside my window.
It was not Ted Hughes’s crow, or Galway’s crow.
Or Frost’s, Pasternak’s, or Lorca’s crow.
Or one of Homer’s crows, stuffed with gore,
after the battle. This was just a crow.
That never fit in anywhere in its life,
or did anything worth mentioning.
It sat there on the branch for a few minutes.
Then picked up and flew beautifully
out of my life.

–Raymond Carver, this poem appeared in All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver, published by Vintage Books, 1996.

Placing flowers in my pots, arranging them on backdrops, and taking photographs creates a conversation with my pottery, a dialog that leads to future variations in form and surface.

“Writing is a conversation with reading; a dialogue with thinking.”

–Nikki Giovanni, quote from her book, Racism 101