Happy Mother's Day!

Dear Mom,
      Thanks for the magic.  I try to use it almost every day.
Your son,
      Matthew David.




Frog: sculpture mix; green glazing, layered.
(This was one of my first guided sculptures, in a class, and my model was a toy frog.)

Frog-Man

Or, Were-frog looking at the moon.

Sculpture mix; glazed with transparent brown and (lightly, quickly) sea-foam. I was expecting more green from the sea-foam, but that was a misjudgment on my part.

One Poem By Tony Hoagland: "Nature"

My friend Meredith gave me Tony Hoagland's Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, a volume of poems that seems to fit me like my old Batman cape and cowl did, like my fins do now. I'm just in my first reading, so the hedging in the phrasing there, but I certainly want to share this one right away. Read. Read aloud, and enjoy.

NATURE

I miss the friendship with the pine tree and the birds

that I had when I was ten.

And it has been forever since I pushed my head

under the wild silk skirt of the waterfall.

What I had with them was tender and private.

The lake was practically my girlfriend.

I carried her picture in my front shirt pocket.

Even in my sleep, I heard the sound of water.

The big rock on the shore was the skull of a dead king

whose name we could almost remember.

Under the rooty bank you could dimly see

the bunk beds of the turtles.

Maybe twice had I sad a girl's name to myself.

I had not yet had my weird first dream of money.

Nobody I know mentions these things anymore.

It's as if their memories have been seized, erased, and relocated

among flowcharts and complex dinner-party calendars.

Now I want to turn and run back the other way,

barefoot into the underbrush,

getting raked by thorns, being slapped in the face by branches.

Down to the muddy bed of the little stream

where my cupped hands make a house, and

I tilt up the roof

to look at the face of the frog.

--Tony Hoagland

P.S. Note how "the frog" works differently, works so much better, than "a frog." And that's just one minor joy of this poem.

P.P.S. Thank you, Meredith.