What the Horse Knows

Green Men: Cyrano, Sir Bertilak, Fergus, Amleth, Treece, and Company

Cyrano de Bergerac: A Mask

(sculpture mix; sea-foam glazing)

Sir Bertilak; Or, The Green Knight

(sculpture mix; green house paint)

Fergus: a Celtic Head

Henry Treece's fine historical novel The Green Man, 

a version of Hamlet drawing upon Saxo Grammaticus' tale of Amleth the Dane

Mytho-heroic.

Self-Portrait #53 (wood-kerne and clay).

Children of the Storm

Clay Dreams: Torso

Body English:

sculpture mix; transparent brown and shino glazing.

20-minute exercise.

Ashes of an Old Poem, Sparks for a New Poem?

Nights, I built fires from the wood
You did not chop.

--MD


This opening sentence has come back to mind recently, and I've been trying to recall the rest of this poem that I'd written in, oh, Winter Quarter 1980 -- in Carl Dennis' 46B: Intro to Poetry Class.  I used to recite the poem to myself as I walked to and from campus, so the memory may be deep and so retrievable.  The setting was a trip down a river, two characters and two canoes, a definite lack of appreciation on the one hand, and a distinct inability to make headway that mattered on the other.  Rocks and rapids, of course, provided the physical obstacles.  I recall a class discussion of the poem, actually, that lasted a good amount of time, which was both alarming and encouraging to me, as my classmates debated the dynamics between the characters.  I was so shy then and speechless; Prof. Dennis assured me afterwards that the lengthy discussion itself, more than the particular comments, was a mark of success in that my poem had held attention.  That was kind.

I can't seem to find the old poem itself, which is only surprising after all these years if you understand just how many manuscripts and notebooks and what-have-you I've kept year after year after year.  Which is part of the problem, no doubt.

I guess I could or should write a new poem.  Maybe I'll pick up from where the memory has left off . . . .

Or, maybe I'll leave that fragment alone.  Let the one image stand.

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.

Talismanic

Looking Out From Ferry Point

Twigs and Visions

The Sleeper, Green: 
sculpture mix; copper carbonate oxide and clear glazing.

(30-minute exercise with model.)

Trunk Visions

Lady of the Marsh

 Venus, A Study: sculpture mix; celadon or light jade, transparent brown, and floating blue glazing.

Art class exercise from a few years back: 40 minute session with model.  Practicing, both sculpting and glazing.  I look at her, and I think of what I have learned, what I can learn.

Face Time: Wet Clay

Practice session. 

Moya Cannon: "The Hidden Rhythms of the Wood"

SYMPATHETIC VIBRATION

          for Kathleen

'You never strike a note,
you always take the note.'

Did it take her many
of her eighty quiet passionate years
to earn that knowledge,
or was it given.

Music, the dark tender secret of it,
is locked into the wood of every tree.
Yearly, it betrays its presence
in minute fistfuls of uncrumpling green.

No stroke or blade can release the music
which is salve to ease the world's wounds,
which tells and, modulating, retells
the story of our own groping roots,
of the deep sky from which they retreat
and, in retreating, reach -- 
the tree's great symphony of leaf.

No stroke or blade can bring us that release
but sometimes, where wildness has not been stilled,
hands, informed by years of patient love, 
can come to know the hidden rhythms of the wood,
can touch bow to gut
and take the note,
as the heart yields and yields
and sings.

--Moya Cannon
from Oar

Neruda's Loaf: "The Writer's Task"

"My first book!  I have always maintained that the writer's task has nothing to do with mystery or magic, and that the poet's, at least, must be a personal effort for the benefit of all.  The closest thing to poetry is a loaf of bread or a ceramic dish or a piece of wood lovingly carved, even if by clumsy hands."

--from Pablo Neruda's Memoirs--

Notebook entry: 2008, I believe.  (I'll have to hunt up the specific edition.)

Robert Graves: Three Cantrips

RECOGNITION

When on the cliffs we met, by chance,

I startled at your quiet voice

And watched the swallows round you dance

Like children that had made a choice.

Simple it was, as I stood there,

To penetrate the mask you wore,

Your secret lineage to declare

And your lost dignities restore.

Yet thus I earned a poet's fee

So far out-distancing desire

That swallows yell in rage at me

As who would set their world on fire.

--Robert Graves

THE GIFT OF SIGHT

I had long known the diverse tastes of the wood,

Each leaf, each bark, rank earth from every hollow;

Knew the smells of bird's breath and of bat's wing;

Yet sight I lacked; until you stole upon me,

Touching my eyelids with light finger-tips,

The trees blazed out, their colours whirled together,

Nor ever before had I been aware of sky.

--Robert Graves

THE SNAP-COMB WILDERNESS

Magic is tangled in a woman's hair

For the enlightenment of male pride.

To slide a comb uxoriously

Through an even swell of tresses undisturbed

By their cascade from an exact parting

Could never hearten or enlighten me--

Not though her eyes were bluer than blue sea.

Magic rules an irreducible jungle

Dark as eclipse and scented with despair,

A stubborn snap-comb wilderness of hair,

Each strand a singular, wild, curling tree.

--Robert Graves