Tomales Bay Kayaking: Quick Glimpses

Clay Wizardry

Ornamentation for the yuletide tree: my efforts over the years.

Green Men: Cyrano, Sir Bertilak, Fergus, Amleth, Treece, and Company

Cyrano de Bergerac: A Mask

(sculpture mix; sea-foam glazing)

Sir Bertilak; Or, The Green Knight

(sculpture mix; green house paint)

Fergus: a Celtic Head

Henry Treece's fine historical novel The Green Man, 

a version of Hamlet drawing upon Saxo Grammaticus' tale of Amleth the Dane

Mytho-heroic.

Self-Portrait #53 (wood-kerne and clay).

Duncan's Falcon-Thoughts

MY MOTHER WOULD BE A FALCONRESS
    --by Robert Duncan, 1919 - 1988

 My mother would be a falconress,
And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,
would fly to bring back
from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
where I dream in my little hood with many bells
jangling when I’d turn my head.

My mother would be a falconress,
and she sends me as far as her will goes.
She lets me ride to the end of her curb
where I fall back in anguish.
I dread that she will cast me away,
for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission.

She would bring down the little birds.
And I would bring down the little birds.
When will she let me bring down the little birds,
pierced from their flight with their necks broken,
their heads like flowers limp from the stem?

I tread my mother’s wrist and would draw blood.
Behind the little hood my eyes are hooded.
I have gone back into my hooded silence,
talking to myself and dropping off to sleep.

For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me,
sewn round with bells, jangling when I move.
She rides with her little falcon upon her wrist.
She uses a barb that brings me to cower.
She sends me abroad to try my wings
and I come back to her. I would bring down
the little birds to her
I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly.

I tear at her wrist with my beak to draw blood,
and her eye holds me, anguisht, terrifying.
She draws a limit to my flight.
Never beyond my sight, she says.
She trains me to fetch and to limit myself in fetching.
She rewards me with meat for my dinner.
But I must never eat what she sends me to bring her.

Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me,
always, in a little hood with the bells ringing,
at her wrist, and her riding
to the great falcon hunt, and me
flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart
to bring down the skylark from the blue to her feet,
straining, and then released for the flight.

My mother would be a falconress,
and I her gerfalcon raised at her will,
from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own
pride, as if her pride
knew no limits, as if her mind
sought in me flight beyond the horizon.

Ah, but high, high in the air I flew.
And far, far beyond the curb of her will,
were the blue hills where the falcons nest.
And then I saw west to the dying sun--
it seemd my human soul went down in flames.

I tore at her wrist, at the hold she had for me,
until the blood ran hot and I heard her cry out,
far, far beyond the curb of her will

to horizons of stars beyond the ringing hills of the world where the falcons nest
I saw, and I tore at her wrist with my savage beak.
I flew, as if sight flew from the anguish in her eye beyond her sight,
sent from my striking loose, from the cruel strike at her wrist,
striking out from the blood to be free of her.

My mother would be a falconress,
and even now, years after this,
when the wounds I left her had surely healed,
and the woman is dead,
her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart
were broken, it is stilled

I would be a falcon and go free.
I tread her wrist and wear the hood,
talking to myself, and would draw blood.

------------------------------------
Thanks to JP for sharing the poem with me.

Ornament for the Tree?

Clay on Deck

Random shots in the rain.

All-Hail to the Fisher-King

Wizard-king:
stoneware; blue glaze.

Children of the Storm

Revisiting: The Merman's Head

The Merman's Head:
sculpture mix;
copper carbonite oxide;
matte white glaze.

This must have been the third of the four or five full-sized heads I have sculpted.

Tennyson: "The Kraken" and "Sonnet"

Two sonnets from Tennyson:

THE KRAKEN
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
          --Tennyson



SONNET
She took the dappled partridge flecked with blood,
And in her hand the drooping pheasant bare,
And by his feet she held the woolly hare,
And like a master painting where she stood,
Looked some new goddess of an English wood.
Nor could I find an imperfection there,
Nor blame the wanton act that showed so fair--
To me whatever freak she plays is good.
Hers is the fairest Life that breathes with breath,
And their still plumes and azure eyelids closed
Made quiet Death so beautiful to see
That Death lent grace to Life and Life to Death
And in one image Life and Death reposed,
To make my love an Immortality.
          --Tennyson

I've always been intrigued by these two poems.   The first offers an apocalyptic vision of a mythic undersea beast that ends only in destruction.  A poem of natural wonder, of marine sublimity, ends in an expression of revelatory faith at the end of times.  Rapturous, for sure.  The second is, to my mind, a moving still-life, intriguing in itself, and yet the title emphasizes form, emphasizes the dynamic relationship of a very English, very constrained poetic structure and the seemingly unpoetic (that is, seemingly unself-conscious) scene it describes via that structure.  

I mean, "Sonnet" is obviously self-conscious, but not obviously self-conscious about its own structure.  What do I mean?  I may be making too much of the title being poetically self-reflexive.  

What would Emily Bronte or her Heathcliff say about such a poem?