Frog-Man II

Frog-Man
Sculpted 2011 or earlier;
Photos August 2018.

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.)

Fool's Gold; Or, The Admonition

How good is the book in your head--if it isn't on the page?
What book?
I don't see a book.
In the head or in the heart?

Page, page, page--that's what matters.

Story of my life.

Read less; write more.
Keep on reading, but write more.
Get it down; revise it.
Do the thing that needs to be done.

Voices in my head.

I'd quote my father, but then I'd just be looking for pity or mercy or something.

Right now the book in my head is a mixture of Homer and Robert E. Howard, John Fowles and Robert Stone, edited by Hemingway. All of which ought to make very little sense at all.

Not on the page.
Doesn't count.

I picked up a new used copy of James Lee Burke's Heaven's Prisoners from Pegasus Downtown yesterday, and now the book falls open to the exact page I was looking for--the previous owner/reader had my same hang-ups, I'm guessing--page 262:

"But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel."

Ouch.

As one of my students once said when faced with this same passage: "No mercy."

Fresh Kelp Needed

 The Merman:
chicken-wire (1996)
and kelp (2015).

Motley

She's a bit of a worrier these days, poor dear.  And we'd just spent about an hour together, she sleeping on my lap and me reading, but those eyes call for more and more, don't you think?

Robert Graves: Ghost Stories

Here are five more poems from the incomparable Robert Graves:

A RESTLESS GHOST
Alas for obstinate doubt: the dread
Of error in supposing my heart freed,
All care for her stone dead!
Ineffably will shine the hills and radiant coast
Of early morning when she is gone indeed,
Her divine elements disbanded, disembodied
And through the misty orchards in love spread--
When she is gone indeed--
But still among them moves her restless ghost.


TROUGHS OF SEA
'Do you delude yourself?' a neighbor asks,
Dismayed by my abstraction.
But though love cannot question love
Nor need deny its need,

Pity the man who finds a rebel heart
Under his breastbone drumming
Which reason warns him he should drown
In midnight wastes of sea.


SHE IS NO LIAR
She is no liar, yet she will wash away
Honey from her lips, blood from her shadowy hand,
And, dressed at dawn in clear white robes will say,
Trusting the ignorant world to understand:
'Such things no longer are; this is today.'


A LOST JEWEL
Who on your breast pillows his head now,
Jubilant to have won
The heart beneath on fire for him alone,

At dawn will hear you, plagued by nightmare,
Mumble and weep
About some blue jewel you were sworn to keep.

Wake, blink, laugh out in reassurance,
Yet your tears will say:
'It was not mine to lose or give away.

'For love it shone--never for the madness
Of a strange bed--
Light on my finger, fortune in my head.'

Roused by your naked grief and beauty,
For lust he will burn:
'Turn to me, sweetheart! Why do you not turn?'

I'D DIE FOR YOU

I'd die for you, or you for me,

So furious is our jealousy--

And if you doubt this to be true

Kill me outright, lest I kill you.

--Robert Graves