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."