First Bronze

The first bronze I ever made was this female torso, whose back is made of desert cholla skeleton, and interestingly enough, lacks a right breast.  Eda rented a foundry for this pour.  The group took turns cranking up the temperature in the gas heated brick kiln we had built.  I had the midnight shift, an eerie time to be by oneself in industrial San Jose with the roar of gas jets ones only company.  Our pieces were in large plaster investments which took long hours to burn out.  But the bronze pour the next morning was an exciting event and I was hooked. That pour predicted many fruitful hours I would spend in future years, working with lost wax process.  But perhaps "Sitting Female" also predicted the loss of my own right breast to cancer some twenty years later.

Domestic coinage....

The Buttons of My Life

Handful after handful of buttons
Run through my fingers --
The domestic coinage
Of my life.

Pristine upon their cards,
Or released from garments
With thread snippets trailing,
Their paleness of metallic roundness
Recalls a negligee's chiffon
Or blue blazer's crispness.

Two holed,
Four holed,
Rear looped;
Bright red,
Mottled grey,
Cloth covered by a rayon fabric --
Half a century of rounded styles --
They represent a treasure mintage
Sequestered in a sewing basket.

Circle upon circle,
Disk upon disk --
Trickling from a handful mound,
Each button flashes
With a memory of brilliance
Through time's sky.

I sort their curves
And look for matches,
Duplicates and triplicates
To fit the buttonholes
Of my life today,
To pay for joys and sorrows.

August 11, 2004

Cultivating our gardens

 Flowers for Granddaughter Carly, no date

 "Of the pleasures incidentally connected with the garden, the power of making presents of the fruits of one's own labors is certainly one of the highest.  A rare bouquet to one who can appreciate its loveliness, a dish of blushing fruit, or a basket of choice vegetables, contributed on some special occasion to a friend's bill of fare--or a rich cluster of grapes to bless the fading sight of some poor consumptive, to whose parched lips they seem almost a foretaste of heaven,--affords a degree of satisfaction to the giver from being the results of his own skillful labor, which can be but faintly realized by him whose gifts involve only a demand upon his purse."

H.W.S. Cleveland,  Landscape Gardening,  1855.     Cleveland influenced "western" urban planning and landscape design and was also a collaborator with Olmsted on Brooklyn's Prospect Park, a codesigner of the renowned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, etc  Quoted in Cornell historian Aaron Sach's wonderful Arcadian America (2013).

Porch Garden, Saratoga Retirement Community

Tulip Bed, Mendocino                                                                                          Yellow Harvest, SRC

 Wisteria

Like early, airfilled grapes
The clusters bobble on their austere
Stiff stick branches.
Soap-film translucent
Lavenders
Curve and blend
With opaque whites
And purple blues.
The blossoms burst this morning
As Japanese paper flowers do
In water.
A magic color explosion
Before the green
Workaday leaves
Take over.

 March 19, 1978

 "Of the pleasures incidentally connected with the garden, the power of making presents of the fruits of one's own labors is certainly one of the highest.  A rare bouquet to one who can appreciate its loveliness, a dish of blushing fruit, or a basket of choice vegetables, contributed on some special occasion to a friend's bill of fare--or a rich cluster of grapes to bless the fading sight of some poor consumptive, to whose parched lips they seem almost a foretaste of heaven,--affords a degree of satisfaction to the giver from being the results of his own skillful labor, which can be but faintly realized by him whose gifts involve only a demand upon his purse."

H.W.S. Cleveland,  Landscape Gardening,  1855. 
Quoted in Cornell historian Aaron Sach's wonderful Arcadian America (2013). 


Cleveland influenced "western" landscape design and was a collaborator with Olmsted on Brooklyn's Prospect Park, a codesigner of the renowned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, etc