Monastery in Ladakh, 2008 Terrance Keenan’s book, St. Nadie in Winter: Zen Encounters with Loneliness, has been my companion while traveling for the last few days. An enigmatic mix of Zen wisdom—part personal memoir, poetry and recovery confessional—Keenan has offered me a rich variation on that unique conversation that can happen with a book. Early […]
Poetry
The Small Ones
Larter 3, a new painting from a series that may be inspired by the astral zone (but you can never be too sure) Outside History These are outsiders, always. These stars— these iron inklings of an Irish January, whose light happened thousands of years before our pain did; they are, they have always been outside […]
Horses Into Ghosts
[the horses] I wanted to ask how do I do this how do I keep doing this how do I stop I once required the moon no once your voice moved the moon for hours across the skylight and the stove burned itself out and the stars followed suit eight hours passed and the moon […]
Hitting High Notes
After the St. Francis Dam Concrete mostly, fractured spans of handrails in their new rust, insistent brown rabbits. Downstream from the floodwave, now someone’s house, green lawn, the sun thick with its own agenda. More rabbits. Ghosts from here to the ocean though I know days aren’t made from holding back and watching bunnies. To […]
Catch All
A few notes and comments: From the web *** Norkae 1, mixed media on wood panel My work is being featured on Design Squared, a visually stunning blog written by Barbara Ashfield and David Hansen. Located in San Francisco, Ashfield and Hansen are both designers who possess fine sensibilities, and I am honored to be […]
(Im)Perfect Circles
And yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling? This koanic line from Bashō became the thread through a variety of impressions and images for me this morning. *** When The Shoe Fits Ch’ui the draftsman Could draw more perfect circles freehand Than with a compass. His fingers brought […]
Doing Dawn, Doing Dusk
Japanese garden at the Huntington Library, San Marino CA Wait Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax— not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely, time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail, one part of my body a hundred years […]
Occultation
I’m Going to Start Living Like a Mystic Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall. The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field, each a station in a pilgrimage—silent, pondering. Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies are the ciphers of a […]
- Aesthetics
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Wood, Water and Meaning
Studio view, South Boston Art making is, for me, a zone of inchoate nonlinearity, one that does not have the Wallace Stevensish delineations* to mark direction or any measure of “progress” (a word that, these days in particular, seems to always need to wear a pair of quotes.) Mostly I am thankful for having worked […]
The Ideal of Emptiness
The ideal of emptiness: Not there yet, but moving in that direction, the Fisher Center at Bard College designed by Frank Gehry I’ve written previously about the slim but beguiling book that I found at the William Stout bookstore in San Francisco, Poems for Architects by Jill Stoner (my earlier post is Poetry and Space). […]