A Favorite View

From the water to the trees.

Mary Oliver: "To Love What Is Mortal"

IN BLACKWATER WOODS

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is

nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

--Mary Oliver

Note: I came to this fine poem from Jennifer Cutting's fine tribute to her beloved cat Mr. Sunshine, who passed away just recently.  Wednesday will be the seventh anniversary of the passing of my own sunshine-orange-boy Rudi.

With A Swimmer's Eyes

Rhymes With Orange

My best ceramics instructor once watched me walk into the studio just after the end of summer and in the first week of my new semester and observed, "Your aura is all spiky."  And he was right.

When I looked at this shot, that's what I remembered.

Feeling a little spiky, a little under the weather, now too.

They Told Me The Moon Was Made Of Green Cheese

The Drowned Man: Mask and the moon.

Can you see the moon?  Follow the arrow to the right of the mask's "ear" . . . .

Vercingetorix: Two Views

Vercingetorix: 

sculpture mix; sea-foam glaze, too thinly applied.

Or, The Apple Man.

Yard-Pal

Lovers Point -- from Otter Cove

Trunk Visions

In The Amphitheatre

Seamus Heaney's "In The Attic"

IN THE ATTIC

1.
Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the crosstrees
Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him
But still green water and clean bottom sand,

The ship aground, the canted mast far out
Above a seafloor where striped fish pass in shoals—
And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands

That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead
Appears to rise again . . . “But he was dead enough,”
The story says, “being both shot and drowned.”

2.
A birch tree planted twenty years ago
Comes between the Irish Sea and me
At the attic skylight, a man marooned

In his own loft, a boy
Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,
Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced

By all that’s thrumming up from keel to masthead,
Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most
Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.

3.
Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma
Of hallway linoleum, Grandfather now appears
Above me just back from the matinée,

His voice awaver like the draft-prone screen
They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier.
“And Isaac Hands,” he asks, “was Isaac in it?”

His memory of the name awaver, too,
His mistake perpetual, once and for all,
Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.

4.
As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the light-headedness

Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,

It’s not that I can’t imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

--Seamus Heaney,

Human Chain, 
Faber and Faber: London, 2010.

David Wagoner: "Lost"

LOST

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.


--David Wagoner,
from Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Thank you, ST, for sharing this poem with me.

Quest-Motif

Reprise: Fergus

Fergus: stoneware; brown glazing, layered; copper wire.
      --a Talking Head, as it were, in the Celtic tradition.

Emerald Waters

Emerald Bay: Fannette Island, Lake Tahoe.

I included this shot in an earlier blog-entry, but only after clicking on the shot and considering an enlargement did I appreciate the ripples, the clear water, the reflection of the tree, and so forth.  That's why I'm reprising this piece in extra large and large formats.

Russian River Kayaking II

Wood-Kerne

Wood-kerne: sculpture mix; green and nutmeg glazing.

Wizardry for the Tree

Radagast the Brown: ornament; unglazed clay.

Puck and Kipling's "A Tree Song"

A TREE SONG

Of all the trees that grow so fair,

Old England to adorn,

Greater are none beneath the Sun,

Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,

(All of a Midsummer morn!)

Surely we sing no little thing,

In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Oak of the Clay lived many a day,

Or ever Aeneas began.

Ash of the Loam was a lady at home,

When Brut was an outlaw man.

Thorn of the Down saw New Troy Town

(From which was London born);

Witness hereby the ancientry

Of Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Yew that is old in churchyard-mould,

He breedeth a mighty bow.

Alder for shoes do wise men choose,

And beech for cups also.

But when ye have killed, and your bowl is spilled,

And your shoes are clean outworn,

Back ye must speed for all that ye need,

To Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Ellum she hateth mankind, and waiteth

Till every gust be laid,

To drop a limb on the head of him

That anyway trusts her shade:

But whether a lad be sober or sad,

Or mellow with ale from the horn,

He will take no wrong when he lieth along

'Neath Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,

Or he would call it a sin;

But - we have been out in the woods all night,

A-conjuring Summer in!

And we bring you news by word of mouth-

Good news for cattle and corn-

Now is the Sun come up from the South,

With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs

(All of a Midsummer morn):

England shall bide till Judgment Tide,

By Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

--Rudyard Kipling,

from his playful historical panorama Puck of Pook's Hill

"Woodnotes Wild"

There are many intriguing trees on the Berkeley campus. I have my favorites.

I've always thought that such trees have spirits, and Nigel here just embodies that belief in a playful way.

Here's a favorite poem from Seamus Heaney about walking in the woods:

THE PLANTATION

Any point in that wood

Was a centre, birch trunks

Ghosting your bearings,

Improvising charmed rings

Wherever you stopped.

Though you walked a straight line,

It might be a circle you travelled

With toadstools and stumps

Always repeating themselves.

Or did you re-pass them?

Here were bleyberries quilting the floor,

The black char of a fire,

And having found them once

You were sure to find them again.

Someone had always been there

Though always you were alone.

Lovers, birdwatchers,

Campers, gipsies and tramps

Left some trace of their trades

Or their excrement.

Hedging the road so,

It invited all comers

To the hush and mush

Of its whispering treadmill,

Its limits defined,

So they thought from outside.

They must have been thankful

For the hum of the traffic

If they ventured in

Past the picnickers' belt

Or began to recall

Tales of fog on the mountains.

You had to come back

To learn how to lose yourself,

To be pilot and stray--witch,

Hansel and Gretel in one.

--Seamus Heaney