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
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?
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.
I am often afraid of being stuck in ruts and repeating myself. I fear that I use the same plant material over and over each season. I try not to repeat the same shape or backdrop, but this afternoon as I wandered in my garden I thought, maybe there is value to mining what comes naturally, that which is in my own backyard.
Lamb’s Ear
While she [Ruth Asawa] was at Black Mountain College, she confessed to her mentor Josef Albers, that she wanted to paint flowers instead of pursuing the more formal, abstract work popular at the time. He told her, “You can paint flowers, but make sure that they’re Asawa flowers.”
–From a wonderful commentary by Wendy MacNaughton in her Draw Together newsletter. The quote comes from an oral history interview with Ruth Asawa and her husband, Albert Lanier, June 21-July 5, 2002 (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).
I taught a workshop this weekend. As I prepared, I revisited my established ideas of making, some rules of thumb, along with recent inspirations. There are so many jumping off points to hone one’s own voice. We are lucky if we get to let it bloom.
“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.”
–Sharon Olds commenting on publishing her first book of poems at age 38. See a description at The Writer’s Almanac (last section)
