Backpacking
in the Hereafter
poems by
M.C. Richards
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
Asheville, North Carolina
Copyright © 2014 by Julia Connor
for the Estate of M. C. Richards
All rights reserved etc.
Table of Contents
ISBN: 978-0-9774138-8-1
They Are Sleeping............................................................... 4
The First Morning............................................................... 5
Potter.................................................................................. 6
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of these poems have
appeared in earlier publications
by the author: Centering in Poetry, Pottery
and the Person, Wesleyan
University Press 1962,1989; The
Crossing Point: Selected Talks
and Writing, Wesleyan University
Press, 1966,1973; Imagine Inventing
Yellow, Station Hill Press,1991;
Before The Beginning, Tangram, 1995;
Opening Our Moral Eye, Lindisfarne
Press, 1996.
Valentine Haiku for Matthew Fox....................................... 7
Letter: March 29................................................................. 8
Strawberry........................................................................ 11
For Karen Karnes: Clay Has a Way.................................... 12
Homage........................................................................... 13
For John Cage on his 75th Birthday................................... 14
Morning Prayer................................................................. 15
Concerts of Space............................................................. 17
Two Portraits..................................................................... 18
To My New Goat.............................................................. 19
Holy Splinters and Toothpicks........................................... 20
Hands
Birds.......................................................... 21
Sweet Corn....................................................................... 22
Editor: Julia Connor
A Westerner Visits Australia.............................................. 23
Ripe Peach....................................................................... 25
At Ground Level............................................................... 26
Cover: French paper, handset type in Optima
and letterpress printed on a Vandercook 15/21
at Asheville BookWorks by Laurie Corral,
August 2014. Inside text fonts: Optima, Palatino
Evening Primrose.............................................................. 29
Bouquet............................................................................ 30
I Am Dying....................................................................... 31
They Are Sleeping
The First Morning
I have painted the female hills
The sun at the top of the hill
stretched and piled against the sky.
Fits its arm down my sleeve
They are sleeping.
And I run to you.
I have given them golden haloes.
They are saints.
You pet me with your long light
They are sleeping.
And your white eyes dissolve into
I have painted the gold in clouds and crevasses as well,
Day.
meaning to sat how they too are saints,
how the world sleeps,
Brightness falls through the air.
how womanly is the landscape,
Where you are dunes of gold
how a whiskered angel also sleeps in a field of grain.
Tell the way.
Now sweeter than milk
On your breast I lie down,
A flower in your throat
My face to the sun.
4
5
Potter
Valentine Haiku for Matthew Fox
(after Meister Eckhart)
This flat plate. This ladle and bowl.
Baby, you iz.
Clay whirled on a wheel, raised slowly to the table.
As God iz, so iz you.
Straight and curved, our primal gestures
As you iz, so God’s iz iz.
take and give—speak out about
the way we stand and breathe.
Every leaf is saucer for the bread.
Every falling drop prepares its cup.
Always we are eating and drinking earth’s body,
Making her dishes.
Potters like sun and stars
perform their art—
endowed with myth,
6
they make the meal holy.
7
Letter: March 29
But to get back about those seeds,
there’s dynamite in those capsules,
dynamite. Death and dynasties go together?
The bright wig wags,
Our old selves, about to sprout?
the hairy noodle wobbles,
Where have we been, all winter?
jays wangle foot-room, I’m telling you, it makes
Ever? Is it like space, a round track?
eye-balls jittery. Can’t believe my eyes half—
where we meet ourselves coming back?
looks like the apple orchards are being roasted
Is it like time, the egg we’ve laid
in rusty auras, they flinch not but stand
coming to meet us well-hatched?
corrective. Daily, brush along the road
I don’t think there are any trade-ins
grows Spanish with fever, peppery red,
here, I think spring is straight.
diagramming blood systems in thin air.
It’s like a big hearth somebody’s blowing on
Spatulas of wind toss paper like flapjacks,
and the light begins to pole
icky mist evaporating snow
and meander and breathe
shovelsfull of bucking backbreaking pewtercolored rocks revealed. They’ve been there
all the time, who’d have known it, these
with somebody’s breath, and that funny radiance
past storms.
you might say luminosity, like light
was not only in the filament
Mouse-down, it must be, pink
but outside the bulb too, like nature stands in it,
and flaky, now flies, rosecoloring my glasses.
poplars in green, willows in gold, parsley in yellow,
Tenderest babes in the world, mice.
hellebore in lime, maples in aubergine, lichens in ash,
New-born spring, like old times, what am I
and grass blades like rays of sun yellow and sharpdarting
saying. Old-born spring, like new times?
out of that big bag in the earth where last summer’s sun
was stored.
Wasps are crawling around in my living room,
half-baked, blind and trying to get going I guess.
It’s enough to make your heart beat as loud as the surf
Spooned one outdoors today, poor dumb sap,
we seem to be lounging and plunging in. Skin-divers
lucky I was the one.
of the upper air, will you go along with me?
Bright fantastic fish? Mouths always going?
Rapture of the vasty depths? Rivers like layers of skin
peeling up through the atmosphere? Plenty of sound?
Water, they say, is an especially great conductor.
Shall we let ourselves be led?
8
9
Walking through fields here is walking through crossfire!
Strawberry
birds bursting in air, red shreds,
earth’s balloon spongy under foot, breaking,
I see holes in it, hear the air escaping
In November
followed by troops. Talk about oceans! Talk about
the strawberry hangs on a thread of sleep.
tight-wires! You can’t walk steady around here, it’s
In May
positively on film, the cameras are all in motion,
it lies in my hand like an erotic peach.
knocked on their uppers by some bud-thrust.
Those bud-thrusts, you could have seen them yourself
last week, big stubby green snoots slooping up out of the mud
in last year’s whiskers, where’s the rest of the body, what’s behind
that big push.
My nerves are wet and misty,
juiced.
The great being is astir, that’s all you can say,
let the oracle speak, its limbs are working.
10
11
For Karen Karnes: Clay Has a Way
Homage
Clay
Sun-up /
has a way, of making seed streets for vagrant birds,
over the valley’s lip a running glaze,
soup saddles to hold us thirsty riders,
lake, crazed and curdled.
clay corned to a bitter red
and straddles and thinned down to blue,
Sun-down / and
I say, clay
the dense rim fires
has a way of being plastic
nut-black, bone-brown.
and without residue, we sing
to the one who works it so.
Stoneware is the night,
We sing: soul and shaper.
its granite foot, astride, the hills
trimmed sills and shallows. O bene,
This is a birthday.
bene,
This is Karen, devoted to the plainspeaking of clay
blessed be the jars that
and its parables.
burn with day, turn smack
center on the whirring dark.
This is our pleasure,
To listen to her vessels’ cuneiform
To respond with a verse
and to love the speaking dust.
12
13
For John Cage on his 75th birthday
Morning Prayer
Dear John Cage
HELP ME I murmur
It is already dusk
as if I knew
and the cows are not yet in –
to whom I speak
already dawn, are not yet out. Listen.
or what I’m asking for.
It sounds ever thus, the breathing.
Sitting in my nightgown
40 years ago
for coffee by the window,
you touched down at our landing,
walking up Third Avenue,
young planets.
waiting in my studio by the clay bins,
inwardly orbiting.
tirra lira loo
O help me,
Our first words were a courtship!
and sometimes I hold my breasts
tirra lira
and a stronger pulse beats upwards
day in and day out
Shall I tell you the secret of our mystery?
as if my words are both prayer and answer.
You are a preacher and I am a missionary.
Help me –
We make love for justice
as if somewhere a great ear listens
and delight: kindliness, laughter, and rage.
to our morning roar,
Macrobiotic eros, you nourish the ends of the earth
an orbit swings open
in ever new beginnings.
and the Spirit of Love like a sharp bite of acid
The cows, John, the cows are banging their udders
etches the ground and I can lift my foot.
like soft cymbals, and the milkers
are playing the teats like bell ropes
tugging and letting go.
The music, my God, the music!
14
15
Help me to feel your presence
in grain and grape,
Concerts of Space
for Lucy Rie
not to wander as if lost
when I am not lost.
I was looking at a friend’s bookshelf
Sweeten my breath from the fantasy
I am not loved nor touched enough.
and I thought I saw a book with the title:
For ecstasy breathes at the windows where I wait,
leaps toward me in little gasps
and my heart leapt!: “What a poetic title!” I exclaimed,
of the cock’s trembling comb,
the hen’s groan, the maple catkins
and then my gaze lengthened, and the words read:
hanging like green teats, the dawn’s pallor.
I am stroked by the darting dapple
this morning
“CONCERTS OF SPACE”
(hearing music of the spheres and heavenly harmonies)
“CONCEPTS” OF SPACE. Never mind, I said to myself,
(and perhaps aloud),
Hopkins praised! Help me
I shall write a poem and call it “Concerts of Space,”
to feel faithfully your presence
and it shall be for Lucy Rie,
riding under the surface
and the cup and saucer she made, and gave to me on Sunday.
in a mighty unwasted current.
Your pots are decisions, Lucy Rie,
decisions, forms, and emblems: mots.
No, no, they are pots of clay,
timbres of darkness and light,
suffered through, come safely through.
Your hands, Lucy Rie, conduct them through the fire:
16
“ concerts of space.”
17
Two Portraits
To My New Goat
Charles Olson
O THOU
O COW
specifically talking, I
mean the words he uses or
nanny, Nanette,
thy udder’s awry, thy
rather utters—salivates, for
instance, is what he does with the
crown’s awag, thy tail atoss.
image to home it, what is it, it’s
ma-a-a-a-a, bleat
homing, it’s a homer. Big to the eyes,
blat, blut, blot. Thy shiny turds
of all,
a-toddle. Whos’ever got thee by thy teat,
higher than the eyes and wider
hot, has thee, has thee not.
than / spaced: specks, ‘stache, bobs
I love your square black eyne, your
off his words and his incisors / breathes. In
leafy ear, your mask of teeth, your
Huff, and pow-nd, pur-ress, plunks out
bass. Gnash, or bucket up
the swim. Goh on, you’re are you, abs-
trot.
Anahid, beloved goddess,
give me to drink. To suck.
solutely right I’ll buy that. Stems up!
Eyes
oh-pen!
After Seeing Sybil Dance…
Did the dancer flit?
She flat.
And I bravoed the where
she hath not sat.
6 yards of tulle, a peck
of plush, and 3
bare feet, rubberized.
Soul full, she pricketh the air
noddeth to God.
18
19
Holy Splinters and Toothpicks
This spring I watched an old man, Thaddeus Peck, make a tree graft.
He brought some tiny bits of pink hawthorn to graft onto a mean-looking
wild thorn apple. Those grafts were no bigger than splinters and toothpicks!
Teensy little bits of tissue, didn’t look like nuthin, but in them a life power,
totally invisible to the natural eye but present to the inner eye of imaginative
Hands
knowledge in Thad’s being: able to transform the quality of treeness coming
up through that big root – transforming the thorn apple into a pink flower.
All I have ever wanted to say about looking at life from the inside, about
seeing into inner forms as generating outer forms, about art and science, is
present right there in what Thad did. A connection between invisible and
visible – and an awareness of the particularity of forms, the importance of
where he positioned the graphs – the tools, the hot wax, the saw, the wedge
and mallet, and now the waiting for the supersensible power lines in that
growth layer to get to flowing. Should grow three to four feet this season if
it’s a good graft, he said. It will change the whole environment of the garden.
We shall see wood as countenance of invisible sun cycles, miniature nuclear worlds, supersensible dynamics of coming into being and dying away,
the tree rings, the actions of fluids and minerals and oxygen molecules and
the combustion of growth and decay, the rising sap and falling leaves. How
the tree is feeding earth and air, and is fed by. How the tree marries the
birds.
human hand and the door is born, the archway, the lintel, the threshold, the
rafter – Brancusi’s King and Queen are born – the table, altar, the box,
the wheel, the cart, the cross. Tree. Tree of life. Holy splinters and toothpicks.
20
20
21
Sweet Corn
A Westerner Visits Australia
Yesterday I was shucking corn
Aphrodite lifts her foaming mouth to the beach
for supper—pulling off the green sheathes
and steps from her shell. We fly
and brushing away the silks—
in a microscopic plane
and suddenly in my hand I feel the naked cob
through plankton and salt to the mother-lode-Uluru:
so cool, sweet, intimate, smooth, like skin I’m holding.
red rock, old rock, deep rooted,
And I am deeply touched by surprise and rapture.
honey combed patterns
in the caves of our birthing.
And I think how it is to feel life in the skin,
Ochre overlays, spirals, and effigies,
in the touch of plant flesh (sweet mill swelling the seeds)—
O ancestor, blow on my hot feet your talisman waters –
and how mostly people go for days
O goddess of love refashioned!
without touching anything from the earth
that lives in its skin, but mostly they are touching
Aphrodite, you live still in the blister of water
metal, glass, plastic, formica, concrete, newspaper,
on the aboriginal frog, to be opened
not a moment of rapture
when our thirst mounts. You live
as in the everyday glisten of sweet corn.
in the wild fig, the grub, the honey ant.
Bloodwood, bright sap, red mother rock,
That it should be an EAR I’m holding!
running colors in the wandering seas of the sun.
How to fathom the image, how to fill the resonant spaces,
the cantata of its inwardness. Like ivory keys
We come with our stories of love
I play the kernels with my tongue:
to this rock of abandonment:
OH
the alchemists’ rock, womb
OH
of renewal – the old goddess watches us
peel away our bark, our covering, our protection.
How shall we love
before we have lost everything?
22
23
Then the green shoot in the wasteland,
Ripe Peach
the footprint in the mud in the bushwalk –
gratuitous, for even our hunger is gone,
razed by the fire at the center.
Only the veiled eye of the frog,
the eroded escarpment.
Peeling a ripe peach
is like
undressing a lover.
Easy folds of cloth pulling away
The walkabout consecrates our nakedness to her kiss.
from the golden flesh: the thigh
Yes, Aphrodite of the walkabout
the peach, the rounded form,
blackened and lustrous,
eased into nudity.
sing you song lines, your dreaming:
the lattice work beneath the surface,
network of dancing, holding, and letting go.
A ripe peach lets you do it:
lets you pull the skin in large pieces
softly, sweetly, lets the fresh moisture
scent the air. Lets the whole peach
Captain Bligh and Captain Cook
searched these waters
roll into your hands
like a lover.
and found their treacherous channels.
We walk through their shadows into the rainforest of Bruny
and fall down at her feet
who blesses the journey in our tiny craft
sailing her waters.
There is a camp here in the maelstrom,
and tomorrow landfall,
and the next day EASTER,
when we-Aphrodite, a radiant vortex,
wet with our tears the feet of love
and dry them with our hair.
24
25
At Ground Level
Evening Primrose
for Jasper and Lindsay Brinton
Pots are for shards
and
And always again The Bud…
shards are
the flower (opening and) rippling through
for shepherds, to cry with.
her shoulders, and down her arms,
Shapes, taken, and taking
-- the bud, the person
shape:
sounding through her flesh like a bell,
avoid it if you can, you can’t,
a long vibrating sound
shapes’ the void
through her body.
we’re in; order is
the chaos we befriend.
A subtle movement of muscles,
the bud, the first petal
SAMSARA: one
thing and not another, one thing
begins to be visible,
flicks out,
and then another; samsara, is what
I wait
I watch
it’s called, what we’re at and what we’re
in: forms, and naming. Names we bandy and
are scouted by, th’outs and innings, everyday a
requiem-birthday,
I saw her the day she was born,
little and swarthy
with a cap of closeknit black hair
spilling the shepherd’s tears, spoiling the shep-
and an old face
herds fears –
and through the years I saw the hair change
the job’s
permanent
at ground level.
JOB
Indian
to taffy-fair, long, swinging
loose
and herself a little leech snuggled
to her father’s side
as he reads to her lying on a bed –
And the bud.
26
27
Thirteen, shoulders “opening,” arms long and active
the long stride forward,
swinging hips, breasts awakening,
the lengthening and shaping,
the bud always, implicit in the flower,
the person in her flesh.
The bud outgrown, the person
Can you see the ripple underneath the skin?
our inwardness made manifest,
our growth a tremor more felt
than seen, a visible cadenza.
Tissue filled with presence, person moves
in the elbow’s bend, hips’ heavy droop,
the swirl of young limbs bouncing and flaunting.
lingers in the probe of the setting sun.
And always The Bud
Every evening a new set gorged with bloom,
infusing the flesh –
tremble in a sudden torque, breaking
the changes –
open. The bud trembles in its flesh, quakes,
its mouth round and ready.
Etheric grace
the swim
The rippling magic shrinks into pulp,
resurrects as the earth’s breath,
and always the bud to come.
ripple after ripple
and the dive into breath.
O DOXA, golden
How to sat it, how to see it:
The body becoming,
and The Bud
we run to the night
golden
we dance the closure
reaching for the edge.
sleek, slim, tight, enclosed –
split –
the sheath pulls away,
the full bud disclosing,
the first yellow of the flower.
28
29
Bouquet
I Am Dying
for Jasper Brinton
I sniff these roses as
thoroughly as my dog would sniff
the sole of my shoe after a city
walk—into and around and through
each petal, each gathering of petals
into rosette, the scent of almond,
sugar, summer, honey, sweet
Four children are singing “ring around the rosy” here
where I am drinking my morning coffee with hot milk.
I was an English major in school -so many famous lines about death:
“Death be not proud”!
Such a masculine presence -part of our paternalistic culture -- and religion.
zephyr from nameless haunts,
I sniff the abyss of
I relax into someone’s arms.
I feel a softness as of sleep,
your nectar.
O verve
a gentleness that is friendly.
O altar
The children are riding their bicycles through my room,
they do not see me or the walls.
I think of Eliot’s Hollow Men
“Is it like this,” they ask
“In death’s other kingdom -walking alone when we are
trembling with tenderness,
lips that would kiss, form prayers to broken stone.”
30
31
Those lines brim with selfpity
and accusation Like Thomas Hardy’s “The terrible antilogy of
making figments feel.”
Oh no, now is not then.
I do not feel betrayed or bereft,
it’s more like the Chattanooga Choo choo:
the great traffic of evolution
and I am carrying my bit of being
free of agenda open to a future
Ready to experiment, be creative, serve
be beautiful, be real,
be nowhere
be no one I already know
be birthing myself
waves and particles
backpacking in the hereafter.
32
Editor’s Note:
The poems in this selection were written across a lifetime, from
the author’s early days at Black Mountain College to some
composed shortly before her death in 1999, here being published
for the first time. They trace her discovery of pottery and praise
for its practitioners, celebrate friendship, record travel, implore
the Divine, glorify the earth and shine a spotlight on first this,
then that, of its marvels, always with an eye, with an ear, to the
process behind the phenomena—always attending to invisible
presence/s. In this way, these poems betray a life lived at a
depth of consciousness—body, soul and spirit—most rare. Here,
then, are the words of someone living close to the source.
Julia Connor
Literary Executor
Estate of M.C. Richards
June 7, 2014
M.C. Richards