Volunteering at the library in Mendocino

Ode to a Bookmark

Pressed between words,
Caressed by numbered pages,
Sandwiched in trash or classic,
Separating past from future,
cutting the author's thoughts in two,
Serving as memory . . .
     This special bookmark
     Is soft and green and supple.
     It traveled with a friend
     As gift from Ireland...
Compressed by paperback and bound,
Embraced by poetry and prose,
Held firm by comedy or tragedy,
Marking a novel's progress,
Tracking the disclosure of knowledge,
Recording the passage of time,
Serving as memory . . .
     This special bookmark
     Travels loyally
     From book to book
     And is my friend.
 November 25, 2002

For Father's Day: Mom remembers her father

Paul H. Daus, a mathematician, bred iris in Los Angeles, sometimes enjoying blooms every day of the year.

Existence and Uniqueness

Dreamwise he stood in my early wakefulness
Holding out toward me what I could take.
Can anyone say anything unique about
Being father and daughter, that the leaves
Drifting downstream on the waters
Have not swirled by before?
He and I, closing mindwise only so seldom,
But more, to be sure, than with the others
Who have shared our time-space
Quarters as human beings.
For laughwise he was good for me.
Loud, gentle, with tall stories.
A rollicking parody on furry-footed hobbits
Written to me when I was ill and away from home...
Writing now, therefore is in his image.
And flowers -
Branching trident-like
Are his iris.
I recall mulched beds of pincushion flowers,
of snapdragons and chrysanthemums
That serve me now with happiness.
An iris has three standards and three falls.
Three upon three for three square
And 3 to the third power and thus
To infinity of natural numbers and
Infinity of real numbers.
Q.E.D., uniqueness and existence
Of my father and I are proved.
Who can doubt it in the 
Persistence of dreams?




August 6, 1973

Community Gardens, Mary Milne

Needlework

These hills of mine - 
These patchy valley squares - 
These muted colors
Singing morning songs.
I weave into their constancy,
A threaded needle 
Dragging life behind me,
Trailing cotton continuity
From one side of reality
Back to the other.
I leave uneven stitches -
A quilting pattern
Of sleep and consciousness
Across the crumpled
Valley folds.

May 11, 1977

Mother's Day: Generation(s) of Love

At the Daus 50th Anniversary

Grandma and Grandpa Daus

Oma and Opa Kahn

To Andy - Welcome Home


There is love in this household,
Fluttering startled from under
The eaves where the spring
Nests sit.
It crouches under the table
Brooding like a pouting child.
It splashes back and forth
In dishwasher arguments
And blazes in calendula
Oranges and yellows
Through damp mists.
This love is here in the leave-takings
And the love-welcomings
Where you expect it to
Make an appearance,
But it is also here
Poking fun at the irritations
Over broken garbage bags
And puncturing anger's
Whit-hot balloons.
This love sleeps peacefully 
Through slashing rainstorms
And waves a smiling red flag
To the mailman
At haphazard intervals.
It doesn't get wide media coverage,
But it curls up comfortably in small poems.
There is love in this household.

March 7, 1979

Generation Grasp: 

A favorite Kodachrome of my mother Daphne Daus's aging hand grasped by Aaron, her first great-grandson, was fading to indistinct pastels.  Why not create the image in bronze?  Intimidated by having to sculpt hands, I phoned Cynthia Thomas, a local artist whose work I admired.  "Could you give me a lesson on making hands?" I asked.  She worked with me for several sessions.  I practiced on small wax hands which are in several sculptures I did at the time.  Then I worked on bigger hands.  They were poured at the foundry she and John Dach run in Philo.  It is, I think, touching that my own hand is now the aging hand of my mother.

Leaving home for my castle in Wales, 1971

Away

Sons grow up and fly away in silver birds
Whose metal skins reflect and catch
The summer blue, the green spring.
The red excitement points of life.
Leaving grey small-boy ghosts only.
One after one after one
Grey hairs twinkle in the twilight,
Transparent tears fall earthward.
A heart can soar where colors are.

July 27, 1971

Made a difference day: April 9th

Venus on a Bad Hair Day

 At Stanford’s Cantor museum, a bust by Giacometti was constructed of 2 planes at right angles - shoulders and narrow head.  Picasso usually slammed planes together into 2-D paintings.  This is the way Venus started:  profile on bare shoulders.  Then I began giving her hair with wavy, untamed strands that shaped a 3-D head.  Then I saw Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" with her right hand reaching up toward her throat.  So I gave my lady a hand (which incidentally, stabilized the piece), and her name: Venus on a Bad Hair Day.  She was welded together from hand, head and shoulders by Yori: art by committee; both in ideas and fabrication.

 

Venus's "Make Up"

Orchards of disarray

Things Are Not So Bad

Things are not so bad.
I stumbled and fell over
A witch's pot of moon-orange apricots
In our orchard of disarray yesterday,

But my leg did not break
Or even turn black.
It looks nostalgically skinned
As if I can later pick at the cracking
Scabs of childhood.
Morris died at 93
Of complications from his broken leg.

 

I had just told the tree-
The grandfather tree
Who seeded the ranging seedlings-
That his fruit was still the best,
But I believe that he tripped me anyway
In spite and admonition,
With an old man's humor.
It was a subtle way
To say
"Don't mock me.
You and I are not so old.
Your leg is not broken
Nor are my branches.
Things are not so bad."



July 4, 1978

Celebrating the fungus among us

Catalina Ironwood - Lyonothamnus Floribundus

Verticilium Wilt - A Soil Fungus

The Catalina Ironwood
Survives pathological seasons;
Non-lunar, non-solar
Leafings and dyings
Dictated by fungal equinoxes.
Where better
To search for irregular springs
Than on our weed-bearded land?
In a clean shaven parcel
The fungus would be labeled
Criminal; not tolerated.

July 29, 1979

Conference in Mexico: Lady's Program

We wives
Are the Americas,
Sitting on the eastern edge
Of the warm Pacific,
Modeled blue
At La Mansion Gelindo
By the pool.

 



















We wives
Are the Americas,
Brought together by slow rockcurrents
To make a fleeting continent.
We have high, aloof plateaus
And lush young tropics.
We have sophisticated cities
And earthy village wisdom.
We have a  crustal unity
In the splashing sun,
We have the awareness, though,
That we were formed 
In the crashing of tectonic plates.
The image
Wells up hot and live
Through thin fissures
When we talk of countries,
Of children, of past wars.

July 21, 1979

Plate tectonics  - and the iconography of "past wars"?

Chapter 4 How the first rainbow was made...

"Once upon an early time,
    A Pomo couple of the land--
Arkila, Komi--in their prime,
    Hunted well, wove baskets grand.
But now the story in this rhyme 
    Tells how the two earned reprimand.

Young Komi in his hunt was lax
    And did not pray before his kill,
So we Gods sent him harsh attacks
    Of chill and fever, made him ill.
Arkila tended to his lacks;
    Then tried to win back our good will.

She wove a basket, beautiful,
    Its rim alive with colored dyes:
Blueberry, lupine, never dull,
    The green from fern to please her eyes,
With dandelion yellow full,
    Then poppy and strawberry prize.

Sun God and Rain God found this bowl
    So perfect we set one-half high
As arch of rainbow, pole to pole,
    Across the blueness of the sky;
Made Kome well; Arkil told:
    "the rest is where your child should lie."

Whether by way of threat or laziness, nature can rework to beauty

Glass Beach Near Fort Bragg, CA

Litter

Philosophically
I prefer to think of the beer bottles
As defiant gestures,
As raised symbols
Thrust at the mature and well-off,
Threatening...

It is somehow sad
If they are only limp
Residues of laziness.

July 29, 1979

 Feb 8, 2014, Eric and Lorel's anniversary: They harmonized, they improvised

Another musical theme: Mom learning recorder

Timelessness

The Lorel Tree, California Coast

Inevitability

I am falling
Through time.
The distance between the bridge
And the dark water
Diminishes 
Swiftly.  Still
I see crisp sailboats
And feel the sweet wind
Rushing past my ears.
How did I become gripped by gravity?
I did not jump. 

May 31, 1980

Green Snow

California has straw hills
Ornamented by dark oak designs.
Their cereal crisp crunchings
Hot dust our nostrils
Until year-end.
Then comes the overnight magic green snow;
A sparkling blanket
Covers road ruts,
Cow trails, highway cuts,
Gullied quarry walls.
Your boots want to stamp patterns in it
And your mittens
Want to pack crystal grass snowballs
To bombard enemy barn doors.
Most of all
Your legs want to 
Run non-stop over green hills
Until you drop exhausted
On the emerald sled slopes,
With you heart beating whizzfast
From the exercise 
And beauty.

December 29, 1981


Mom would have been inspired by Simon Beck's efforts.  See:

Your boots want to stamp patterns in it  ...