I’m late posting but I have been thinking about the equinox all week. Today I really felt the shift in light and season. My okra which I mostly grow for their beautiful flowers and sculptural pods lost most of their leaves in the last 24 hours. I harvested the stems and pods and then photographed them. Their thick stems and spreading roots are admirable.

As I dig for wild orchids
in the autumn fields,
it is the deeply-bedded root
that I desire,
not the flower.

—Izumi Shikibu
In The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, Penguin Random House, 1990

“Izumi Shikibu is recognized as an outstanding poet in Japanese Literature,” Jane Hirshfield writes. “She lived in the imperial court during the only golden age in literary history in which women were predominant.”

The longest day of the year is here and it’s time for a pause. Time to trust the hours that have carried us forward into dusk and these long days.

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

—Galway Kinnell. from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, Mariner Books, 1980.

A full day of welcoming friends to see our work, followed by a lingering dinner on the porch with a long discussion of how we see colors, especially the qualities of June sun shafts of blues and greens. The memory of moons in my pots dance with the fireflies as the vast softness of the evening settles.

After Many Springs

Now,
In June,
When the night is a vast softness
Filled with blue stars,
And broken shafts of moon-glimmer
Fall upon the earth,
Am I too old to see the fairies dance?
I cannot find them any more.

—Langston Hughes, from The Weary Blues, 1926

At the end of my morning dog walk I picked this little clump of clover. I hesitate to call it a bouquet. I was thinking about babies, birth, and birthdays. I was dreaming about the childlike gifts of fistfuls of blossoms, the kind of thing that we all gave to our mothers at one point or another.

Poem to Watch Over You

The day you were born was the shortest of the year or the longest,
there was a rain storm or hail or it was a cloudy or cloudless night
and your mother or your birth mother or your father or your birth
father or your life giver was reading at home, was on their way
back from the store was on their way to work, had no place to go,
was dreaming of you when you woke them, when it was time,
when you were ready to arrive, to escape, to see what the fuss was
about. On the way to the hospital, on the way home, on the way to
the midwife, or the bathtub, in the back of the ambulance, taxi
or parking lot, on the side of a hill, we received you, pulled you
through, held you, made an opening and whispered, shouted, urged,
pleaded. You are welcome, you are welcome, you are welcome.
There were no requirements nor identification nor documentation,
you were born without restriction. Not even the supernatural could
hold you back, bold thing, from this oblivion.

—Omotara James, from Song of My Softening

May your portions of salad green be generous. May you have beautiful plates upon which to serve your meal.

I speak with the future.

We sit on our skeletons’ bones. 
We hear with our skeletons’ bones.
We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.

The original meaning of Paradise: a place, 
a walled garden. 
Our lives, our stories, this hour inside one.
A staircase from Piranesi. A hummingbird drinking.

Outside it, vanishing species and rivers.
Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden.
Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.

The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again,
restarts.  

A kalpa is brief, and wall-less.

Unborn ones, take nothing for granted.
Not nectar, not thirst.

May your lives be uneclipsed, your failures be passing.

May you have your portions of beauty, of grief, 
in a garden whose plants and birds I cannot imagine. 

—Jane Hirshfield, from Poem-a-Day, March 30, 2026, Academy of American Poets

I make an effort to give my pots names. When we are loading the wood kiln it helps to be able to say—”hand me the small moon vase” or the large “sandwich vase.” I remember in 2013 when Warren and I were preparing for an exhibit of plates at Omen-Azen Mikio pressed us to come up with poetic names for each series of plates. At that point in time I thought of names in terms of clay, firing, or process, but he encouraged us to think of our pots like witnesses to nature. No matter if the piece felt ancient or classical Mikio nurtured us to find mysterious names that were beyond the material.

Pluto

Don't feel small. We all have
been demoted. Go on being

moon or rock or orb, buoyant
and distant, smallest craft ball

at Vanevenhoven's Hardware 
spray-painted purple or day-glow

orange for a child's elliptical vision
of fish line, cardboard and foam.

No spacecraft has touched you,
no flesh met the luster of your

heavenly body. Little cold one, blow
your horn. No matter what you are

planet, and something other than
planet, ancient but not "classical,"

the controversy over what to call you
light-hours from your ears. On Earth

we tend to nurture the diminutive,
root for the diminished. None 

of your neighbors knows your name.
Nothing has changed. If Charon's

not your moon, who cares? She
remains unmoved, your companion.

—Maggie Dietz, from That Kind of Happy, University of Chicago Press, 2016

Recently, I came across some hand drawn maps I had made for my parents. By drawing these maps I was charting my own life as well as aiming to communicate the geography to my New York City based parents of the life Warren and I were imagining. I was not sure they understood the lines that connected the rolling hills of Virginia to their urban artist existence. The tentacles of our love enticed them to visit and once here they understood the water, dirt, and light.

Maps
for Marcelo

Some maps have blue borders
like the blue of your name
or the tributary lacing of
veins running through your
father’s hands. & how the last
time I saw you, you held
me for so long I saw whole
lifetimes flooding by me
small tentacles reaching
for both our faces. I wish
maps would be without
borders & that we belonged
to no one & to everyone
at once, what a world that
would be. Or not a world
maybe we would call it
something more intrinsic
like forgiving or something
simplistic like river or dirt.
& if I were to see you
tomorrow & everyone you
came from had disappeared
I would weep with you & drown
out any black lines that this
earth allowed us to give it—
because what is a map but
a useless prison? We are all
so lost & no naming of blank
spaces can save us. & what
is a map but the delusion of
safety? The line drawn is always
in the sand & folds on itself
before we’re done making it.
& that line, there, south of
el rio, how it dares to cover
up the bodies, as though we
would forget who died there
& for what? As if we could
forget that if you spin a globe
& stop it with your finger
you’ll land it on top of someone
living, someone who was not
expecting to be crushed by thirst—

—Yesenia Montilla,

Early this spring there was a goose nest below the studio. It was a tender exposed thing at the pond’s edge that I checked on each day. Then, one day the eggs were lost, the nest strewn apart, and the adult geese lurking on the pond. My emotions took me by surprise when that clutch of eggs was lost. Now with the trees as witness, there are several families of geese that wander closer and closer to the house and garden. I see and hear the geese everywhere.

The Wild Geese

They are not wisdom
or freedom or history.
They are not what’s lost.
They are nothing but wild geese.
I can hear them everywhere,
wings pushing down metaphor.

—Victoria Chang, from The Trees Witness Everything, Copper Canyon Press, 2022.

This month I have been making an effort to make a drawing a day in my sketchbook of recent work from the wood kiln. These are ten minute sketches with pen or pencil and a bit of watercolor. Later, I often add some acrylic paint to give the object a sense of place. The habit of drawing always teaches me more about the art of looking. I have been photographing these drawings and importing them to our iPad where I can hand letter bits of text. On one sketch of a Blade Moon I inscribed a T.S. Eliot quote, “between the idea and the reality is the shadow.” I shared these images with a group via Zoom on Saturday. I felt the images come alive as I read the words and my audience saw them. An organic understanding grew between teller and listener as I read and they responded.

“Stories don’t exist on the page or in the mouth,” she [Jane Yolen] told The Boston Globe in 1987. “They exist between — between writer and reader, between teller and listener.”

—Jane Yolen in Clay Risen, obituary for Jane Yolen in New York Times, 6/14/2026

“The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.
—David Hockney

This month I have been drawing every day as well as taking photos. It’s like I am carrying one more thing than my hands can hold. I aim to capture the recent pots, the birds I can hear in a 10 minute recording, the light, the poetic moment, and my green purse. I try not to spill my coffee and still capture the beauty and sorrow of these June days.

Flowers

This morning I was walking upstairs
from the kitchen, carrying your
beautiful flowers, the flowers you

brought me last night, calla lilies
and something else, I am not
sure what to call them, white flowers,

of course you had no way of knowing
it has been years since I bought
white flowers—but now you have

and here they are again. I was carrying
your flowers and a coffee cup
and a soft yellow handbag and a book

of poems by a Chinese poet, in
which I had just read the words “come
or go but don’t just stand there

in the doorway,” as usual I was
carrying too many things, you
would have laughed if you saw me.

It seemed especially important
not to spill the coffee as I usually
do, as I turned up the stairs,

inside the whorl of the house as if
I were walking up inside the lilies.
I do not know how to hold all

the beauty and sorrow of my life.

—Cynthia Zarin, from Orbit: Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, 2017