Auras

Dream, then taste our fruits,

    I find them sweet.

A day of change comes,

   when you'll know you have been foolish.

Weave us into the soles of your shoes,

  spread our bodies across the streets.

See us in the sky, lighting the night,

   or rustling in leaves after dark.

We'll wait between claps of thunder

   tall, without regret, history, or fear.

Standing in the shadow of your breath.

We are of the same cloth, 

   worn to rags by the same stones.

Longing

In these hours,
working the plow in straight furrows,
I doggedly seek mastery,
yet long for beginner's mind.
Every task was a leap of faith,
and every step a treasure.
I long to hear my Muses again, whispering
their parade, their voices.
Sense filled my heart, their peace prevailed.
These days such gifts are rare . . .

So You Talk of Music

Gulag hands haven’t hurt her.

Our master, please, model always above, see romance.

Look sharp, on Crete a mother of film wants luscious delusions.

Come, you and I . . .

Get how a baby's green harmony,

This mare above him, was caught.

Smother us in a black limpid experiment.
Joy is about canvas, young-headed, sleep.

My mate, such a wild chant is Music.

Heal, have control over us! Patience! 

No time to tell about more glorious endeavors.

If Time could think . . . our anger would have every faithful share.

Balance, cuddle with empty color. Did you die?

Shimmer about rain,

Start weak sweet Daughter, choose your subject.

A fire-eye filled in light, symbols I see, offer unity,

They wasted my other canvas.

Film my aesthetic, you can use it 'till he creeps around babbling.

Choose an old soft ritual about fresh life.

Model, play your companion hard -here howls a beautiful language,

A liar's metal instrument, is totally afraid.

May you please comfort us, you won't cover all love!

Seek your last thought in Beauty

All motion starts me questioning . . .

Sculpt Angel, fill a glorious missive . . .


March 1, 2012 w/ Kerri Taylor, 3, 4, 4-2, 5

The Muse Poems:

   1  2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Fall Chaga

Autumn comes, the leaves fall off the hardwoods, the forest opens up. One can see distant hills and mountains, and the rays of the setting sun penetrate the bare branches near sunset and scour the back of the eyes with a deep orange.

Perfect time to gather Chaga. I say 'gather' but it's more involved than that. The Chaga polypore fungus is actually a very sturdy mushroom growing like a lump of black sclerotic cork out of the side of a birch tree. It seems to take hold where the tree has been injured, bruised, or lost a branch. The Chaga fills up the void. Sometimes a Chaga mushroom can get very large. I've cut some down that weigh nearly forty pounds.

Doing this is not always easy. Most of the time, it will be within reach of my pruning saw, but not always. I've seen them a full thirty feet up. To get these monsters, I have to construct a ladder of saplings in the forest, lashing together small pieces of beech with clothesline, and lean it securely against the trunk of the birch. Hopefully this extends the reach of my saw just enough so that I can, on tiptoe, reach the sacred mushroom.

And then establishing a sawing action by activating the calves, and feet, . . . up, down, up down.

Soon I'm dusted with a fine Chaga rain. I've worked on some that have taken three sessions to get down, the first to establish a platform to cut from, and the second to do the cutting. It's an incredible strain on the neck, looking up and working the arms or feet up and down.

Eventually the big mushroom comes off, and if it is over a few pounds, you want to be well out of the way.

Boom!

Usually it takes me two or three hours of looking to find the first Chaga, then, as if they were in touch with each other, I find seven or eight in a row. Even a random walk into a new section of woods five minutes before sunset leads me right to a monster Chaga.

I always wonder about this. My cousin Wyeth spent all summer searching a section of state forest for Chaga, and had no luck. Then one morning he leaned his bicycle against a healthy birch with no Chaga growing out of it, and went for a long hike.

When he returned, the largest Chaga mushroom he had ever seen was growing right out of the tree above his bicycle. He swears to this.

Perhaps Chaga is a master of camouflage, and can trigger neuronal activity in the brain, thus hiding itself. The Siberians consider Chaga a god, hence the capitalization. Chaga is a King, who marries the princess Birch tree. Like Raven, another deity of the north, Chaga seems to control what you see and hear.

Done right, both the Chaga, and the birch tree, will take no notice of the harvesting. The sclerotium will continue to grow in size provided the base is left intact.

Chaga culture has spread through our little community in the Adirondacks like wildfire. Everyone's drinking it, brewing it in different ways, making alcohol extractions, serving it hot and nutty flavored with maple syrup and raw milk, or cold and thin like ice coffee in the summertime.

I have some cousins that are roaming the woods marking the location of every Chaga they see on their GPS.

I never seem to remember my camera when I go Chaga hunting, perhaps because the added weight makes carrying the Chagas, and the pruning saw out of the woods that much more difficult. But a harvest of Chaga is a thing of beauty, like a bucket full of blueberries, or a creel full of trout. I'll wrap them all up in an old sheet and carry them out like Santa's sack, over one shoulder.

More hard work comes after I get them home. They have to be cut into small pieces, though lately I've been keeping one or two larger chunks to use directly in the kitchen with a wood rasp to make a quick expresso-like infusion.

Busting it up into chunks is hard. It doesn't respond well to sawing unless bolted down or held in a vise. Some chop it up with an axe, but that sends pieces flying everywhere. The best way is to get to it quickly with a butcher's cleaver or a chisel. This year I used a pile of boards set on a thick carpet covered with a sheet to catch the dust and smaller bits, and a heavy mallet and old broad wood chisel to do the breaking. It took about two hours to chop up the load pictured here into one inch chunks.

Chaga has an interesting structure. The inside is laced with whitish veins that connect to the tubules in the birch tree bark. From this it gets the sap. The very base is circled usually with a few spirals of birch bark, the result of the Chaga growing and expanding inside the hole made by the downed branch. Most of the polypore structure is orange-brown and cork-like. The outside is covered by a thick black very porous layer rich in melanin. I believe this layer evaporates water constantly, acting like the leaves of the branch that fell off. This preserves the roots assigned to that branch, keeping the anchorage for the birch, and at the same time, ensuring the Chaga's supply of sap.

While cutting it apart I notice more Chaga rain all over my clothes, dust that flies off with each blow of the mallet. The powder makes an excellent super strong drink, great for brewing right away.

Language on Pots

My pottery has hit a new obsession - language.

Drawing and writing seem to be merging onto ceramic form.

I can't let the figure alone! Drawings are starting to morph into a kind of shorthand, the figure becomes a kind of pictographic script.

A starting point for the evolution of a new kind of thinking.

A graffiti, or scrawl of a Buddhist poet.

Figure drawing is the departure point. It has nothing to do with taste. I haven't made ten thousand brush strokes of pine or bamboo with a brush made from the tail of a dog. I haven't mastered 10,000 Kanji characters or practiced the English calligraphy with the broad quill of a turkey.

But I have drawn, from life, and from my imagination, with my life. I'll take the reflexes learned from that kind of drawing, and turn it into a kind of shorthand, a code if you like, that reduces the language of the figure, and turns it towards writing. Towards sense . . . towards commentary.

My goal is to do this in ceramic where another force enters the picture, fire and fusion of glazes and oxides on the surface of the pot. This radically changes the outcome.

On some of my tea-bowls I'll do a quick landscape and then subject that bit of study to the blasting of a wood-fire  where the ash runs, and drips and destroys half of what I've drawn or written.

In such bowls my attempt at landscape are minimal, a dash for a horizon, a slash for a tree, a scribble for a bush, a sloping line for a roof.

The fire transforms the statement.

So lately I've been experimenting with ways the fire can transform the language of the figure. Here's an example:

But what about using the reflexes of the hand, the brush, to simplify and reduce the language of the figure?

So I began to think of the figure as a kind of package of options. What sort of hat, what sort of face, what sort of belly, pose, etc. . .  and then how, in a brief shorthand, can this be put into almost comic strip form.

Doing this requires suspending conscious thought and instead drawing instinctively. I'll think in advance generally about each drawing . . . for instance a few days before I glaze I'll say to myself, "I'll put witches hats on some women, and fancy wide brim hats on others . . " but then when the brush is in my hand I'll draw without even thinking of hats or breasts or bodies at all. I scribble literally, and let the brush run wild. . . . 

As one interested in language, poetry and coding, How much I can put into this script? 

Actions carry content, but some actions contain a muddle of inputs, and the result is not decipherable. The problem of language is one of efficiency. How much meaning can be encoded into a single brushstroke? What is the depth of culture that can fit into a single action or movement?

Letting the subconscious mind turn drawings into letters was a process that mankind achieved over a period of at least ten thousand years. From cave paintings to the Phoenician aleph is a long journey.

Is it possible to create a personal language based on drawn forms and accomplish that process in one lifetime?

If so, then the fire that is making the transformation is not kiln fire, but fire of the mind.

A Boat in the Sky

Each fall it's time to drain the pipes, put antifreeze in the traps, clean out the fridge, fold up the dirty linen, and wash all the dishes carefully and cover them with tin foil (a vain attempt to foil the winter frolics of mice).

My daughter's red plastic kayak, which sits on the porch most of the summer, must be brought in. Don't get me wrong. She paddles beautifully, and for fishing, cannot be beat. Her form is sculptural, even seductive. Her hips are ample, her beam broad enough to support the stoutest person in comfort, or a young girl with a swift paddle in water skimming ecstasy.

Being a plastic boat she does not measure for a prestigious slot in the boathouse, where the family's guide-boats sit mustily all winter, gleaming in their spruce and cedar perfection, hewed of micro-thin lapped boards that match perfectly, laced together with thousands of small copper tacks.

She is not that. Yet some craftsman and boat-maker did labor long and hard at her form. Tested her in the water, approved her for use by children, as well as experienced adult paddlers. Then kicked out by the thousands from a mold.

My first boat lives in that family boathouse, one that my grandfather offered to me in his declining years, if I would carry it in from a far flung location on the property, then restore it lovingly. For decades, it had resisted the incisors of porcupines gnawing its oar handles for the salt, and the occasional whack from a black bear, albeit from the outside. For a decade after moving it out of the wet and away from animal predations, it followed me, like a loyal beast, in various turns, living with me in my New York apartment, in a loft on Greene Street, and in my parent's basement in Connecticut.

My grandfather called it a 'stream-boat', at fourteen feet it could handle two men and a deer easily, on the lower reaches of the Shingle Shanty. It was drawn to turn effortlessly, yet glide straight as a scull across the smooth ripples of the stream. Rowing her in dry times took skill, but with a draft of barely an inch with one passenger, she could be run up over the top of a beaver dam, allow the passengers out, and then a moment to tow her over the other side. The speed and carrying capability of a guide-boat far outstripped the canoes of Maine design brought to the region later by sportsmen.

Her ribs were of impeccably bent spruce roots, with bottom board of cedar, the very highest degree of wood craftsmanship in any culture, during any period.

How many family histories might be told through boats? This I wonder bemusedly, as I haul our little pudgy plastic kayak indoors each fall, into the living room of our little cottage, named 'Meadow's Edge' by my father. Then, huffing and grunting, I lift her bow up into a strap loop which I've thrown over the rafter above. Then the stern. Then moving a chair between bow and stern, I cinch her up closer and closer to the single rough hewn rafter above, until her keel almost touches. She is upside down, hanging in the air, and so will remain all winter.

Night falls, I relax on the floor, for some yoga, only the flicker from the wood-stove to illuminate the little dark cavern of this cottage. I gaze up at Maya's kayak, upside down, ready to embark upon a journey through the heavens, an upside down journey . . . to where?

In the haze of the yellow embers of the fire, the logo "Old Town" reads like a palindromic reflection of a logo for "Coca-Cola". I yoga my way downstream afloat on an oversized red bottle of Coke. I ride into the underworld and cross the river Styx.

The fire in the stove surges, wind picking up outside. My sky vessel spins like a compass needle upon the magnetic currents of an aery void. It leaps and swings to the rhythm of rapids in another world.

I launch upon a series of inverted yoga poses. Head bent back in shoulder stand I play with my feet against the outline of my craft in the sky. I surf the bream of the heavens. I am 'Dead Man' about to be put adrift in the Pacific with all my earthly belongings, sent to a sea burial in the West.

Somehow I transition from yoga into bed. Dawn arrives. The ritual continues, mop the floor, clean under the disk drain. Sweep the back porch. Unload the fridge. Turn off the gas. Prop the refrigerator door open. A last look.

Maya's kayak swings in the breeze of the open door. Is that a goodbye? She will be here in the spring.

Is the world that we inhabit, all floating in a boat that is upside down?

Song of 81 Poems, XXXIV

Who draws our emotion?
Hail, if loosened, Amen!
    I'll plead to you 

    as she stand with no camera.

She sees a street's electric instrument.
    makes it of felt. 

Run Lady, use and comprehend,
    Lust never repressed freedom.
Chanting equality, death knows some sense,
     water and life energy,
    The other Mom is a song of anguish.

Oh Fortune, you guys never said, 

    or drove past.
    Only performed.
Pathetic Parasite! I have him fast.
Should I cuddle impulsively, imagine form?
Perform praise better?
We're old since she's aware
    of him. This dust has grown.
See the killer dance,

You must know men deep,
    snap her from that trotting fiend . . .
Open wide, paint her electric harmony,
     down high, sure, a wry society above.
    Always faithful, he finds more music.

Text your women your sanguine perfume.
    Friday, the dead will howl by then.
Have soft clever respect,
Follow the absurd girl who wants a dust mountain.
They are silhouettes of sounds you just spoke.
    Discover him in other's dust.

Get how the babe's green harmony, reaches.
     Now chisel and throw, hide joy.

Song of 81 Poems:

  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 38 40 41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

I'll Row you to Komodo

Tired of earthquakes, I'm off to Malaysia,
Less venomous snakes there, I'll smell the acacias.

And if you should dispatch, to Sulawesi,
Study your Dutch goed, then catch the ferry.

Chant Shinto, and make fire with flint-o,
I'll learn Voodoo, and incant like a Hindu.

Tremors in Timor means lava in Java,
Dance rhumbas in Sumba, for folly in Jakarta.

We'll get good food oh yeah, in dear ole Malaysia.

Fetter your feet to my mast my dear Mistress,
Better to beat me, than face a low mattress.

Don a kimono and I'll row you to Komodo,
In Kowloon we'll go saloon, I'll be your dear Frodo.

In my dream you were a succubus,
A demon who worked with an Octopus.
Together we all boarded an Omnibus,
And then rode to town the three of us.

My hopes are to climb, a sloped volcano,
Don a kimono, and row you to Komodo.

There are deer in Komodo, though people don't stag hunt,
There's a queer sort of fear of the resident dragon!

We'll tan yes, it's obvious, if we hike up Vesuvius.
Don't call me a genius, if things suddenly get igneous.

Once we start napping on the peaks of Merapi,
We'll wangle an angle on a rented serapi.

I'll grope your nappies on the slopes of Merapi,

We'll fangle an angle on a dope head's serapi.

Finding this ditty too graphic and corny though?

I'll try to be witty, after we blast through old Borneo.

Tiny poems tend to be volcanic eruptions,
that bring me back to Platonic corruptions.

The Box of Formulas

Stephen's been hanging out at the house and not doing much pottery.

His shoulder and left arm are tied up into a huge contraption of black foam that he calls 'the couch'. . . designed to immobilize his forearm, arm, hand and shoulder all at once, till his torn ligaments, which were just operated on, recover.

Meanwhile he's thinking of just about every possible thing he can do to move his art along without actually sitting down at the wheel or lifting heavy bags of ground rock to make glazes.

"I'm under doctor's orders. I can't touch anything that weighs more than ten pounds. I think we can probably fire around the 16th, when I get back from Maine. I'm working out some ways to hold some big platters and glaze them."

The air outside his house, situated on a bluff in Fairhaven CT, was sweet from the smell of a walnut tree that grows over his driveway.

"Unless you want your car hood redecorated I'd move your vehicle"

The nuts were falling fast, big and heavy and round like hailstones. If you have never smelled a fresh walnut, they have an intense scent, like lavender or camphor. 

"I keep four or five in the truck to keep it smelling nice."

I brought over a small bin that we scrounged together yesterday. And Steve had promised to hunt up some recipes for overglaze washes and slips.

Stephen Rodriguez is one of the best potters working anywhere, someone I have a huge respect for. More than anyone he educated me in this art.

I was in my late 30's when I took it up, and started attending Steve's class at CAW on Audobon St. in downtown New Haven. He demonstrated wedging clay, huge rounds that spiraled like the petals of a flower. We built a kiln together, his design and supervision, he's guided me in glazes, clays and working through all the problems that hit potters at some point or another. He's fired kilns from New York to Maine, built and rebuilt more kilns than he can count. He's been my master, and inspiration to dozens of local potters who got their start in his classes. Yes, I have learned enormously, from others too, a workshop with Malcolm Davis, firings with Tony Moore at his wood kiln in Cold Spring NY, and all the many other potters who comes with their work. But Stephen's the one who has been around all my potting life.

He's seen me languish, diverting energies into construction, poetry, and painting, but he calls me back regularly with the handle, "Hey you making pots?"

Steve throws big, with eyes practically closed, arms deep in the center of a wet wobbling jar, a Beethoven struggling to hear notes from the clay.

Years later I have my own studio and am starting to make more work. Lately his bad shoulder has been the impetus for a series of firings we've done together at my place. I lift the shelves into place.

"Let's light this baby.". . . . "Potter wipe the bottom of that pot!!"  . . .  "All the girls at CAW spend time VACUUMING the kiln!"

But particularly whenever I'm glazing or firing alone, I just have to begin work to hear Steve's voice, echoing between my ears.

"Put it on thick. Be generous. If you put it thin it will break up . . ."

or . .  

"This one wants to be thin . . . thick and it will craze and fall off the pot . . . Be careful."

or . . .

"Have a good look in the spy. Do you see atmosphere? Is heat building? The flame should be visible."

or . . .

"Aw hell, we're not even hot yet!"

We went into Steven's kitchen.

"Here are three SCOBYs for your new Kambucha. You need some horsepower. Two gallons is a lot!" Steve was referring to a large glass container we purchased together yesterday at Walmart, sized to keep my family in endless Kambucha.

"Now taste this!" He poured out some of his home brew. "It's got George Cleveland's wild cherry juice in it. Hey, reach on up and grab that box for me would you? It has all my glaze recipes."

The box was quite large, and packed with folded, creased and torn pieces of paper, old copies, magazine reprints, hand-written glaze formulas transcribed from index cards, from word of mouth, from everywhere. A lifetime of chemistry on the surface of pots.

The names are magic . . . Chuck's Shino . . . Virginia Wirt's Shino . . . . Bill Murphy's Green . . . 

"Here's a wash that will stay black. Copy this one."

We made a huge stack for me to take home and copy. Practically every glaze in the mammoth pile Stephen had mixed or tested at one time.

"Most are terrible. Not worth the time. This yellow was great, but something's changed. I've mixed up five buckets and never been able to get it right again."

"You can help me . . " he added. "I'm looking for 'Judith's Ochre Celadon' 

Sure enough we found it. . . . the only way to know was the scraps of paper it was on, barely, held the last two letters of her name . . ."____th's Ochre Celadon". It was bent and creased and stained and smirched with bits of glaze chemicals.

What are glaze formulas but mixtures of the various rocks of the world, ground up?

Liked recipes for baked bread, they have the same ingredients again and again, flour, sugar, yeast . . . or rather Kona F4 Feldspar, Nephelene Synenite, Red Iron Oxide . . . Each holds a mystery, the promise of a color, a texture, a feeling, a behavior much as different parts of the earth 'behave' under pressure and time, and turn magnificent in the glint of the sun.

That is the potter's foray into terrestrial alchemy. Unity formulas, batches, test tiles, but never the same result exactly. We're not about industry. We're about nearly, and often, and sometimes. The blessings of a kiln God. The luck of the fire. 

Water Rituals - Chaga and Kambucha

Time to make drink for the studio.

Fill the Brita filter pitchers, two of them, wait till it goes through. Boil water.

Water for tea. Tea for kambucha.

Doing overtime that electric kettle. Just bought a 2 gallon glass flask yesterday with Steven, for serious kambucha production. How are my little SCOBY's doing?

Tea water. full boil. Four spoons of black tea and eight of white sugar into my wife's big teapot.

Fill up the kettle again. An uncomplaining machine of the twenty-first century. Somewhere in Bridgeport a giant GE turbine takes notice of the load.

Snowflake on a blazing stove . . . .

-:-

I read somewhere that there's a gal who makes dresses from big rectangular Kambucha SCOBYs. And purses!

   Her SCOBY dress was soft and fine,
   Alas rain fell - she turned to slime!

Old Adirondackers know Chaga as a tinder polypore, a dependable source of fire and flame in the coldest wettest weather. In days of yore, Siberian shamans prognosticated the future by lighting two lines of Chaga. The stuff burns like gunpowder, even when wet. The line that burns fastest, that's the prophecy.

In Sweden, Chaga is known as the 'Cancer Polypore' for no reason other than it cures cancer. I will relate some true tales of its powers at a later time. I give the stuff away to people with serious afflictions of the awful disease.

Descriptions of Chaga taste? "Nutty coffee", "Tastes like dirt!", "Tastes like really good water!" . . . "Tastes like tea!"

Chaga is a god in Siberia, so the name is capitalized.

     Who knows? The Chaga knows! 

The young princess birch is injured, Chaga saves her. He binds her wounds. He lives with her. Marries her. Together they prosper. But eventually he devours her young limber flesh.

I mix Chaga and kambucha and they seem to love each other, so I think I'll start capitalizing Kambucha too. Stephen swears by Kambucha. Mexican rural mothers use the old SCOBYs for curing rashes. It gives the skin a tonic.

Best darn thing for the male prostate!

I mix up my two Gods the night before a day at the studio. By the time I'm thirsty my cold thermos has a black beard at the bottom that looks like tea-leaves . . . I drink it up.

Stephen my firing partner, drinks Chaga and Kambucha also; we share lore on the two drinks. He found Chaga on a big white birch on Mt. Desert Island in Maine, and another on a grey birch in Lyme CT. He makes his Chaga by using a Sureform plane to grind a small expresso load of powder and does a Chaga extraction, like a custom coffee.

Never throw away Chaga powder. It keeps making. . . . Add it to 100 proof vodka and make an alcohol extraction. Serve with Kahlúa and creme. Or drunk hot and strong at night with maple syrup and a touch of cream, or iced and downed in the heat of midday to quench a thirst.

-:-

The Chaga schlerotium feels woody, like cork. But there is no relation at all between the structure of cork, which is a wood, and a polypore fungus, which is a mushroom.

Around 1500 Million years ago funghi evolved from other life . . . A planetary emergency . . . there was a shortage of soil, and too many dead plants that weren't rotting. The funghi came to the rescue . . . dedicating a species of fungus, at least, to rot every single species of plant.

The mushroom returned the power of the sun to the soil. Funghi made their cells of scarab tough chitin. Beatle-back tough, strong as a dragonfly's gossamer wings . . .

They evolved neurotransmitters to signal through long cells in the ground, just what species is rotting where. The nervous system of all animals is something inherited from early funghi.

There's no thirst-quencher like Kambucha! Stephen speaks of a 100 year old woman who lives in the Mexican jungle. She looks sixty, and wrote a book on the stuff.

Water for plants, tea for the Kambucha, water for tea . . . it all flows, one container to the next. Pour pour. Stainless into glass, glass into ceramic. Try not to waste a drop. Either I drink it or the plants do. . . . Ahhhh . . .

"Ohm swaha . . . " I'm a priest, pouring Ganga water liberally about my temple. I slosh some into my matted locks. I wonder if my kids will remember to push a glass of Chaga to my lips just as I leave this world.

Today's studio fuel is half-Kambucha, half Chaga, with a splash of wild cherry juice from a Guilford wild cherry tree. Gratis Stephen, from one of his many friends. It's so sharp it'll make your teeth fall out. So purple, you become regal by looking at it.

-:-

Stephen's convinced that without Chaga we'd have both died of mesothelioma from inhaling ceramic fiber. Nasty stuff. Keep that Chaga flowing.

He's a paragon of health but working through a bad shoulder. The VA hospital did surgery on his left wing last week. He has to stay away from the wheel, from pretty much all pottery until the thing recovers.

"Use the time to read your poetry! Research new glazes. Quiet time for the first time in your life."

"It's a damn pain. This couch is heavy and hot." The 'couch' he speaks of is the brace the doctors affixed to his arm so he can't move it, at all. Stephen's bummed, as any man of action would be when stopped cold by fate.

So he's hitting the St. John's Wort and mixing with Chaga. At least he knows. "We're hunter gatherers." We gather and hunt and eat and drink what is right.


My last Chaga harvest came from a yellow birch on the Salmon Lake trail. She was a princess alright, who had taken too many Chaga lovers. A city of Chaga horns sprouted from her giant trunk. It took me all morning to cut down her royal excesses.

Surprisingly as a tree, she was still quite strong and limber. They would live together for many years, sprouting seed and spore . . .

I just cut off the growth, not too tight to the trunk. Unlike a burl Chaga grows back.

I rinsed the dishes.

What are we, but Chaga starships, . . . of water and tea.

Song of 81 Poems, XXXIII

See what hellish influences
  Lions at home speak out!
     Laughter heals too, through ruin.

Choose your subject.
   Why must it be manipulated? A delusional fantasy,
      More ways for the faithful to give sense.

The instrument of electric strength presents health,
   Absconds to a bed of grain,
      Sculpt her red, through time empowered.

Me, a dark deep strengthening dream,
   My fiery cunning work must hurt you less.
      Then say why marrying has trouble.

It's a missive dunt of black,
   Problems, it's time they confronted.
      Father fooled us, as a joke.

Surreal fashion had a young impression,
   Right, behind a storm, in your arms,
      Decay gives you psychedelic angel paint.

Infants better know a fool, fresh and glorious.
   Discover my empty death,
     How she understands silence.

Heal by intimacy, come Pet, some party cares . . .
   Perhaps you heard,
      Patience, walk my favorite!

Your finger, and all these words Pal.
   "Howl", we said. "You're the best."
      Unity knows process, from important missions.

See her actor, a paragon angel.
   Choose only play, fight smoke by lust.

Song of 81 Poems:

  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 38 40 41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Song of 81 Poems, XXXII

Tea makes spirits too rich to follow,
Cunning lunatic, I'll come to you,
   to start your body blossoming.

Start weekly, sweet daughter you must choose,
Discover the thread of memories.
   This will reach you, for my mind is in heaven.

Imagine there, absurd passions,
   influencing her watery luscious memories.

Sanguine Friday is here.
Blue maid, psychedelics for a studio head,
   He has no green to hold her, chocolate.
So guts earth?
If to compose form,
   questions are under way, more damage, oh dear.
Sanity makes a scratch part - the key is glorious women's praise.

You did dance surreal, neurotic,
Hence water lost her sanguine will,
   from damaged smoke.
That animal I saw nailed me, and oh I'm sure,
   will do some manic canvas.
He models Mama,
   Come here, I'm all about bed work.

They lost some part.

Song of 81 Poems:

  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 38 40 41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81