imageless obbligato

Friends, I have not posted to “One with Clay, Image and Text” in December yet, and it is December 28th, and plenty has happened, including clay sculpting and poetry performance and the deaths of friends and causes for alarm and for celebration, but my storage of image is at its 30-gigabyte limit, and after months of chivvying with compressed-image switching and such the technical difficulty has become overwhelming, and I haven’t carved out a chunk of disposable time to put a real fix into place, so this will be an imageless post. It is not the first such, but I really do lean on image, so it feels imposterish, but I’ll get over it.

Here is a poem that refers to my latest efforts of working with metal leaf. The slash marks are line breaks.

leaf // some metal alloys are made into sheets / of such thinness that they can be adhered / to a surface of a working of art for decorative enhancement. this sheet-form / is known as metal leaf and it has been used / with art objects from illuminated manuscripts / to canvases to sculpture to murals / for centuries. // the paper pages of a book / may be referred to as leaves as well / though such usage may be considered archaic / but the inertia of language / has kept the phrase “turn over a new leaf” active nonetheless. // i sometimes wonder / how misunderstood walt whitman’s book title leaves of grass is nowadays. // (what a delightful archaism “nowadays” is! alas that “thenadays” and “hence-a-days” / never came to be!) // lately i have been enhancing / my ceramic birds / with metal leaf that looks like gold / but is far less costly. i have turned over / many a new leaf doing so / and hope to upgrade someday / with a solo art exhibit / called “leaves of gold.” // an archaic way to say “just as soon” is “just as lief” / but for the sake of a punchline ending / i’d just as lief leave “just as lief” alone.

If you’ve read all the way through this post, Friends, you have my sincere gratitude. I hope 2024 is your best year ever!

• Gary Bowers
• language
• leaves of grass
• metal leaf
• poetry