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
I often buy my own flowers. Warren knows I love them but it is not his language. Recently, when we went to the grocery store together he reminded me to look at the flowers but I said, “No, now is the season of flowers in our garden or at the farmers market.” But then, as we stood in line to check out, I really admired the peonies the man in front of us was buying. So I went back and treated myself to the moon-like peonies.
I want to tell you something. This morning
is bright after all the steady rain, and every iris,
peony, rose, opens its mouth, rejoicing. I want to say,
wake up, open your eyes, there’s a snow-covered road
ahead, a field of blankness, a sheet of paper, an empty screen.
Even the smallest insects are singing, vibrating their entire bodies,
tiny violins of longing and desire. We were made for song.
I can’t tell you what prayer is, but I can take the breath
of the meadow into my mouth, and I can release it for the leaves’
green need. I want to tell you your life is a blue coal, a slice
of orange in the mouth, cut hay in the nostrils. The cardinals’
red song dances in your blood. Look, every month the moon
blossoms into a peony, then shrinks to a sliver of garlic.
And then it blooms again.
–Barbara Crooker, “Listen,” from Line Dance,
copyright © 2008 Word Poetry.
I have been thinking about how poems are read in our communities. Friends ask me how do I find the poems I use for this project and I say I just keep my ears open. Sometimes at a dinner or in a yoga class a topic will spark and someone will recite a poem from memory. But more often, poems seem to be shared at weddings and funerals. I wish we offered them up in more settings.
My ocean worn bricks are listening. At a memorial today we have been sharing memories about our sculptor friend, John Daniel McCarty. He had an eye that recognized the weight of things. He made visual associations between scale and material that allowed us all to see with broader sensitivity and deeper connections. We shared a love of oysters from the Damariscotta River. I imagine the river stones are singing and the trees are leaning closer to hear us remember a sculptor and his love of place.
The river stones are listening
because we have something to say.
The trees lean closer today.
The singing in the electrical woods
has gone dumb. It looks like rain
because it is too warm to snow.
Guardian angels, wherever you’re hiding,
we know you can’t be everywhere at once.
Have you corralled all the pretty wild
horses? The memory of ants asleep
in daylilies, roses, holly, & larkspur.
The magpies gaze at us, still
waiting. River stones are listening.
But all we can say now is,
Mercy, please, rock me.
–Yusef Komunyakaa, “Rock Me, Mercy” from The Emperor of Water Clocks,
published by Farrar Straus and Giroux, Copyright © 2015 by Yusef Komunyakaa.
I walked this morning thinking about shadows. The green grass was muscular and the light was striking, although slightly muted by the Canadian wildfires. I and our dog, Luna, moved through the field, the path and along the road parting the grass and the air. We noted the shifts of shadow from the looseness of the knee-high grass to the clarity of mowed trail to the sharpness of the shadows on the paved road. Luna and I each have our reasons for moving and walking even if it only involves chasing our own shadows.
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
–Mark Strand, Keeping Things Whole from Selected Poems, published by Alfred A. Knopf, © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand
Our friend, John Neely, died this weekend. At the North Carolina woodfire conference in 2022, for some an opportunity to showcase large pots and macho egos, John Neely exhibited a beautiful and sensitive selection of small woodfired cups. I tried to buy one but they were all sold. I told John how much I liked them and he offered to trade. So when we got home we each sent the other two cups. Warren and I have often treasured these small objects.
John was an organizer and presenter at this year’s conference. Last week, each evening after the formal events of the conference, John happily filled everyone’s cups with liquids along with stories and laughs. I have no desire to go back to school, but sometimes I have wished I was a fly on the wall of his ceramics program at Utah State University. John’s former students seem to have gained so much and move through the world in great ways.
The shock and sadness of John’s passing on Sunday has spilled through our nervous system.
My Cup
They tell me I am going to die.
Why don’t I seem to care?
My cup is full. Let it spill.
–Robert Friend, from Dancing With A Tiger: Poems 1941-1998 (Spuyten Duyvil).
Last week I was at a North Carolina woodfire conference where my job was to listen; to be part of the ecosystem of the clay world. Now back in the garden in the ecosystem of my home I am able to bury myself in the lush green leaves of kale and pick my favorite garlicscapes. I toggle between garden and studio attempting to be witness to the season.
Sanctuary
Suppose it’s easy to slip
into another’s green skin,
bury yourself in leaves
and wait for a breaking,
a breaking open, a breaking
out. I have, before, been
tricked into believing
I could be both an I
and the world. The great eye
of the world is both gaze
and gloss. To be swallowed
by being seen. A dream.
To be made whole
by being not a witness,
but witnessed.
–Ada Limon, Sanctuary, in “The Hurting Kind”
published by Milkweed Editions
Welcome to June and the first in a series of 21 posts — an offering of images pots, poems and snippets inspired by the expanding days of June.
My mother loved the sunset. Often it felt like seeing the sunset with her was an emergency. Today marks not only the beginning of spring but also that day and night are equal. This morning I walked the dog and brought home a small bundle of the tiny yellow blossoms of spice bush. This afternoon I noticed my magnolia is blooming, the daffodils are glorious, the forsythia is doing its thing, and even our old sideways Redbud tree that came down in a February ice storm is trying to bloom. The news is terrible and our country may feel inhospitable right now and so each of these moments of beauty feel like an emergency.
“When we encounter a poem that is powerful, we are not the same when we leave it. The next time you take a walk, you are seeing the world through the lens of that poem. You are experiencing your relationship through that poem, reading the news through that poem, parenting your child through that poem.”
–Jessica Nordell talking with Maggie Smith, “Your Art is a Tool and Beauty is an Emergency,” in her 3/20/2025 newsletter on Substack
In the studio this afternoon the light was reflected by the snow. I wedged clay in a shaft of light. I rolled slabs and sifted white clay on my table and transcribed the poem A Dangerous Time through the dust. My words are messy, and when I press my wet clay into the dust it gets further abstracted. But the sentiment is clear. I want to flood the world with poems about how we might show up together. I made five deep bowls with the poem by Rosemerry Trommer printed backwards. The bowl/plates will warp and shift as they dry and are fired. They expand as I press them onto the table and they will contract as they dry. I am accepting of the distortion that happens through the process. These shapes become a safe place for love, for food.
A Dangerous Time
I think of the bones
of the unsung rib cage,
the way they protect
the heart. How bone,
too, is living, how it constantly
renews and remakes itself.
I think of how ribs engage
with other ribs
to expand, to contract,
and because they do
their solid work,
they allow the heart to float.
This is what I want to do:
to be a rib in this body
of our country,
to make a safe space for love.
There is so much now
that needs protection.
I want to be that flexible,
that committed to what’s vital,
that unwilling to yield.
Here it is, the solstice. The longest night of the year has arrived. Physics and astronomy can explain how and when this moment occurs. But for me it’s about the mystery and the marking of a subtle shift, the feeling of a pause before the increasing daylight clearly begins to shift the balance.
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, from In A Marine Light: Selected Poems