The Fish Are Free . . .

. . . agents, and they swim where they will.  Not extras in my personal drama.

I like that they chose to swim about my bit of sculpture, though.

Looking at this photograph makes me want to hold my breath, in sympathy, and to swim like a fish, free amidst the push and pull of surge and tide, to swim with gills and purpose and repose.

Can you hear the water calling you?

I hear the call, and I always hope to.

P.S.  I want to append something that I wrote in another venue a few minutes ago.  I think this note belongs here, partly because when I look at the photo above, my imagination, my mind, my emotions are triggered in ways that I can't always quite explain, but that non-verbal response is one key to the value, the experience, of art that cannot and should not be reduced to test questions and GRE results.

There are books, poems, that I'll never teach, frankly, for they mean too too much to me. And yet there are plenty of worthy books and poems, so I'm not really withholding anything. And, I've taught poems that caught me by surprise, in which I was reduced to tears in the classroom, and so far I've always been able to turn those moments of vulnerability and potential embarrassment and stifling to worthy account. A few years back, I choked up over Tennyson's "Ulysses" because it's about old guys wanting to seek adventure again and my best pal wasn't going to be there to be old with, for he'd died recently, and that choking up came out of a blindspot, but I turned it all to account in the classroom.  I let myself be choked up, and I talked about choking up.  I talked about how this poem about an ancient Greek king wasn't just a history lesson for me, wasn't just dead material, but that the poem meant so much more, that the poem connected me to so much more because I was open, emotionally- and not just intellectually-engaged.  So, yes, I cried when I tried to read this poem aloud, and I talked about why.  

One student came up to me afterwards and confessed that she'd never seen the point of poetry and literature until I showed her that it mattered to our lives, and she wasn't just looking for the A, you know? She got it. And that may be the most valuable single day in that whole semester in terms of literature's real and complex value.

Thunder, Free, Curse: Three Poems from Brendan Kennelly

SPECIAL THUNDER

He had to reach the island in the winter gale.
From Saleen Quay he pushed the little boat
Over the rough stones till she came afloat;
You'd swear he could see nothing when he hoisted sail
And cut the dark.  Once a grey shape blurred
Above his head while pitchblack water slapped
And tried to climb over the side but dropped
Into the sea, thwarted.  In time, he heard

The special thunder of the island shore,
He hauled the boat in, sheltered near a rock
And smiled to hear the sea's defeated roar;
Breathing as though the air were infinitely sweet,
He watched the mainland where the hard wind struck.
The island clay felt good beneath his feet.


FREE

Once ever a boat capsized on Red
So simply he couldn't tell why.
One moment the sun caressed his head,
The next, his world was water.  His eyes
Opened, closed, hurt by the urgent green
That pressed him down, down into the mud
Until his face touched the obscene
Slime.  Strange, though, how foul touch calmed his blood.

His grey head about to split in pieces,
He kicked free, free till he broke into the air.
Breathing hugely, he righted his craft in time,
Clambered aboard.  Ghoulish faces
Of water haunted him, seemed to stare
At his repose.  The sun tasted of green slime.


CURSE

They said a curse was on the boat.
It would never put to sea again
Because two men were lost from it.
Red bought it from a fisherman
For thirty pounds and four tides later
Headed it out into the Shannon.
'There's no such thing as luck,' we heard him mutter
'There's but the skill and strength of a man

With sure hands and sense in his head.
And one thing more.  Luck was never known
To drown the living or raise the dead
But many a cocksure man went down
Because his trust was not where it should be.
Out there, forget your brothers.  Trust the sea.'


--BRENDAN KENNELLY,
from his Love Cry sequence,
collected in Breathing Spaces: Early Poems,
Bloodaxe Books, 1992.

"On Faith From Some Artist's Image": Broumas and Begley

On faith from some artist's image
a sheet of paper saying you are possible
I thank the artist for that
island continent its small aborigines
values I stand on I invent
and in the very middle of that gap
the givers


-- Olga Broumas and T Begley

from Sappho's Gymnasium,

Copper Canyon Press,

Port Townsend, WA: 1994

Exit Strategies II

Free Diving: Coral Cove

On a low viz day, unfortunately.  Still counts!

Hold Your Breath

The Muser:
sculpture mix; copper carbonate oxide.

30-minute exercise with live model.

Curiosity, Thy Name Is Harbor Seal

Curious harbor seal. He came within 15 feet of me and parked himself on a rock. I was playing in the shallow water, attempting to take photos of a clay fish with actual fish as extras.

One-Trick Sea-Horse

I may be a bit of a one-trick pony with water and clay, but I haven't bored myself yet, and at age 52 I think that's one of the few sure guides to living well.

Octopus Sighting: Sculptural Fun

Ichabod the Cephlapod: 

sculpture mix; green, denim, shino, yellow, trans-brown, and other glazes, layered.

Out of the kiln, into the creek.

Sea-Caves: Mendocino

Lighting By Bushmills -- And Brendan Kennelly

Self-Portrait #52.

"We are all occasionally turned to stone by what we witness, think and feel.  Out of that same selfstone, the imagination moulds and coaxes a persona who, entering poems and animating them by his presence, is seen and felt to be a creature of flesh and blood.  The cold of stone is imaginatively caressed into human warmth, surely one of the transfiguring graces of poetry.  (It can happen the other way round too, and be no less a transfiguring grace.)"

--Brendan Kennelly, from his Islandman,
quoted in his Breathing Spaces: Early Poems, 
which I'm excerpted, respectfully, here, among other places in this blog.

I've felt like an Islandman, an enisled "selfstone", and I have wanted others to feel like islandmen or personae too, though I certainly didn't quite have the words for it until this passage from Kennelly.

Printer's Devil

One of my poems in print.  

Elemental Visions: The Druid Meets The Sea

Star of the Show: Spiny Creature

Seal: Mendocino Living

Wet Clay: Proto-Equus