Munich Stone

Clay-Gray Friday

Ill at home, waiting out the fever and fret.

Green Man, Weary

Clay: soldate;

glazes: oribe and sea foam.

I was lucky with the blending, I think.

Sand-Encrusted Creatures As The Tide Falls Away

Barnacle and sea anemones anchored to the wall of the surge channel.  

The tide was dropping.

Two small sea anemones tightly closed and covered with sand.

The eye of the abyss . . . .

An unlikely, but definite, beauty.

Some sea anemones are still partially opened as the tide is dropping.

Surge channel.

Surging water fills the channel and covers the creatures . . . until the water recedes, drawing back for the next wave.  High tide won't occur again for hours.

Flow in action.

Two More From Brendan Kennelly

UNION

When salmon swarmed in the brown tides
And cocks raised their lusty din
And her heart beat like a wild bird's heart,
She left her kin.

A black ass brayed in the village,
Men ploughed and mowed,
There was talk of rising water
When he struck the road.

Words stranger than were scattered
Over the shuttered dead
Were faint as child-songs in their ears
When they stretched in bed.


THE SINGING GIRL IS EASY IN HER SKILL

The singing girl is easy in her skill.
We are more human than we were before.
We cannot see just now why men should kill

Although it seems we are condemned to spill
The blood responding to the ocean's roar.
The singing girl is easy in her skill.

That light transfiguring the window-sill
Is peace that shyly knocks on every door.
We cannot see just now why men should kill.

This room, this house, this world all seem to fill
With faith in which no human heart is poor.
The singing girl is easy in her skill.

Though days are maimed by many a murderous will
And lovers shudder at what lies in store
We cannot see just now why men should kill.

It's possible we may be happy still,
No living heart can ever ask for more.
We cannot see just now why men should kill.
The singing girl is easy in her skill.

--BRENDAN KENNELLY


P.S.  I feel I am going to, in Wordsworth's words and Heaney's echo, "singing school" with Kennelly.  And glad I am, indeed.

Shadow of a Man

"Whirl is king."  --Aristophanes

Seamus Heaney's "The Tollund Man"

THE TOLLUND MAN

I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters'
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

II
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

-- Seamus Heaney,

from his volume of poetry Wintering Out,
Faber & Faber Ltd, London, 1972.

Bog Man: stoneware; clear glaze.

2009 note: "Just fooling in art class; found myself with this fellow in my hands. (Of course, after all those years in the peat bog, his nose would not be quite so strong.)"

Rest in peace, Mr. Heaney, and thank you for your art, your voice, your compassion.

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.

Mask: Ape-Man (With Details)

 

Ape-Man: sculpture mix; emerald glaze; copper wire.

I made this mask years ago--Summer or Fall 2008?--and it's about the side of my hand with the fingers outspread.

"A Jar of Pain": Lyrics By Jackie Leven

CLASSIC NORTHERN DIVERSIONS

I took a train out of leeds in the smear and stain

I saw the city pass by in the shuffling rain

I'm in huddersfield drinking in the slubber's arms

and i walked through slush by broken farms

where huddling sheep are turning grey

in the cold light of a nothing day

it took me fifty long years just to work out

that because i was angry didn't mean i was right

now i'm sitting in a bar alone

with the jukebox playing a terrible song

the bartender says I see it's you again

I been drinking deep from a jar of pain

Ch -- i remember once i went home like this

i had my mother in tears as i felt her kiss

now my mother is heavenbound

and her body lies in unmarked ground

in every heart in every home

there's a dying man who lives alone

he close the door and he turn away

and the tide rushes in on a fatal shore

i can never get too close to coal

with a glass in my hand and the ember's crack

but the fire's gone out and the chimney's closed

and there's a round jeer sticking on my back

ch --

I took a train out of leeds in the smear and stain

i saw the city pass by in the shuffling rain

and with chimneys leaning to the sea

i got the salt of sunderland creasing me

i took a jar of pain to the soaking field

and to the lonely seawall inn south shields

if i was a man which i am not

standing in the last of the rotten snow

i'd fall on my knees and cry out loud

to the snowy river and the icy flow

i took a train out of leeds in the smear and stain

i saw the city pass by in the shuffling rain

--Jackie Leven

from his CD Shining Brother Shining Sister

Wet Clay: Moon-Man

"In A Long Rage": More Poems By Louise Bogan

I've been reading around  again in Louise Bogan's The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923- 1968--The Noonday Press: New York, 1968--and I have four more poems I'd like to share.

I've quoted four other poems by Louise Bogan here.

Read aloud, please, and listen:


MAN ALONE


It is yourself you seek
In a long rage,
Scanning through light and darkness
Mirrors, the page,


Where should reflected be
Those eyes and that thick hair,
That passionate look, that laughter.
You should appear


Within the book, or doubled,
Freed, in the silvered glass;
Into all other bodies
Yourself should pass.


The glass does not dissolve;
Like walls the mirrors stand;
The printed page gives back
Words by another hand.


And your infatuate eye
Meets not itself below:
Strangers lie in your arms
As I lie now.




BAROQUE COMMENT


From loud sound and still chance;
From mindless earth, wet with a dead million leaves;
From the forest, the empty desert, the tearing beasts,
The kelp-disordered beaches;
Coincident with the lie, anger, lust, oppression and death in many forms:


Ornamental structures, continents apart, separated by seas;
Fitted marble, swung bells; fruit in garlands as well as on the branch;
The flower at last in bronze, stretched backward, or curled within;
Stone in various shapes: beyond the pyramid, the contrived arch and the buttress;
The named constellations;
Crown and vesture; palm and laurel chosen as noble and enduring;
Speech proud in sound; death considered sacrifice;
Mask, weapon, urn; the ordered strings;
Fountains; foreheads, under weather-bleached hair;
The wreath, the oar, the tool,
The prow;
The turned eyes and the opened mouth of love.




PACKET OF LETTERS


In the shut drawer, even now, they rave and grieve--
To be approached at times with the frightened tear;
Their cold to be drawn away from, as one, at nightfall,
Draws the cloak closer against the cold of the marsh.


There, there, the thugs of the heart did murder.
There, still in the murderers' guise, two stand embraced, embalmed.




SOLITARY OBSERVATION BROUGHT
BACK FROM A SOJOURN IN HELL


At midnight tears
Run into your ears.