Up North: Life in Minnesota

Buying Dishes from Gary Crawford

When, last Sunday, Elizabeth and I walked in the back door, home again from our visit to the Minneapolis pottery studio of Gary Crawford, I set down the cardboard box labeled Continental Clay Company that once held raw clay and now held pottery formed, glazed, and fired by our new friend. I lifted up a butter dish smaller than my outstretched hand. Elizabeth pulled a large bowl and a serving dish from the newspaper that wrapped them. We looked at the three. You made a good choice, she said, looking toward the butter dish, its waxy off-white surface faintly pocked in irregular patterns, like wood grazed by insects or pecked by birds. We looked again at the bowl whose blue glaze had burst into celestial patterns in the 2500-degree heat of the soft-brick kiln. We perused in the white porcelain serving dish the very human artifice of hand-etched lines like basket-weave, laced with a circling ribbon of watery green glaze. I answered, I think we just purchased three small pieces of the universe.

World of Seasons

This morning I look up from the snowy sidewalk—shoveled behind me, unshoveled ahead—and across the cottage houses and the tall trees that withstand so still the cold before sunrise, before twilight, before any light but streetlight. I wait with the trees. Elm beside me. Cottonwood across the street and over the elm. Cedar and jack pine. My breathing slows and my brow cools and I feel the place where I stand, the frozen ground. This is a world of seasons, of great change, but change whose rhythm is old and large beyond reach. We can warm the earth, but we cannot—so far—disturb its passage around the sun. And here, north, that passage is recorded upon every living and nonliving thing, in gravure of hot and cold and light and dark. My breath rises into the dark air. I move now, head down, shoveling ahead to keep ahead of the looming chill. Round the corner, up the front steps, I finish quickly, clearing just what is necessary. Back inside the house I pull the gloves from my cold fingers and stow my coat and boots and there is Elizabeth in the kitchen.

Cottonwood Like Love

Island rising from sea of soil, the roots of the cottonwood like love.
Grooves channeling rain to roots, the trunk of the cottonwood like love.
Holding sun and tasting light like sugar, the canopy of the cottonwood like love.
Each quaking, all shining, the leaves of the cottonwood like love.
Falling in flurries of coming life, the seeds of the cottonwood like love.
Like our love, the life of the cottonwood.

Zebra-Striped Tree

There is a zebra-striped tree. Deep grooves, dark stripes in the bark of the tree. Up the tall trunk, taller than many. Massive limbs branching to leaves. Glossy on one side and matte on the other, leaves flip in the wind one side to the other. Each one moves alone. And the multitude shimmer. That's the word, shimmer. Ten thousand wheels turning, flags waving. Ten thousand prayers for sun sustaining this old seed through its trajectory from earth to sky, monument to recurring life. Cottonwood across the street, by my river home in the wooded city above the northern prairie. Outlive me cottonwood. Fly your seed. Drop your branches where you will. You are my progeny as good as any. Live for me.

© John Clay