Casting for Herring

JP doing the work.

Ring: "Waves"

A good-luck ring, I'm hoping.

Classic artistry from the Irish metal-workers on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, CA.
You can find their fine work here.

For me, the wave-ring is also a wyrd-ring, the pattern of becoming, of winding and unwinding, that marks the Old English idea and practice of fate, of the world's workings, of past/present/future.

Check the rings and lines of age on my hand too.  I'm reminded of how trees show their life-lines.  Knotwork.  Or, there's a Bruce Sterling novel that I never liked much of a future dystopian universe in which wealthy people could live long, long lives in young and younger bodies, but their hands would give them away -- the signs of aging in the wrinkles and lines of their hands being resistant to the otherwise miraculous drugs to offset mere age -- would give them away, and as an older reader now, as an older man now, I see what he was getting at.

That's cool.  Slipping over the cusp of 2015 into 2016, I think about something the great surfer Fred van Dyke said --in an excellent documentary, David L. Brown's Surfing for Life -- "I'm getting older, and I gotta dig it."

Something like that.  And I am digging it.

(Talk to the hand, if you don't dig it too.)

Moya Cannon: "Emptinesses Which Hold"

NAUSTS

There are emptinesses which hold

the leveret's form in spring grass;

the tern's hasty nest in the shore pebbles;

nausts in a silvery island inlet.

Boat-shaped absences,

they slope to seaward,

parallel as potato drills,

curved a little for access --

a mooring stone, fore and aft,

and a flat stone high up

to guide the tarred bow

or a hooker, pucan, or punt

when the high tide lifted it

up and in, then ebbed,

leaving it tilted to one side,

in its shingly nest.

--Moya Cannon

'WE ARE WHAT WE EAT'

That's what she said,

'Every seven years

almost every cell in our body is replaced.'

I thought of her own art,

how faithfully rendered

the miraculous lines, the miraculous lives,

of feather and bone --

and I remembered an oak rib,

honeycombed with shipworm,

given as a keepsake to another friend,

who had sailed from Dublin to the Faroes

in a wooden fishing hooker,

which was later rebuilt.

These boats are rebuilt, renamed,

until every plank and rib

has been replaced so often

that nothing remains

except the boat's original lines

and a piece of silver,

hidden under the mast.

--Moya Cannon

Salvage Work (small): sculpture mix; blue slip; clear glazing; copper wire; twig; twine.