J. Zimmerman

Three Hundred Open Studios

All weekend we've walked between artists' studios, the shapes and textures, and the body-talk of the artists: the chest-thumping of the Maori-tattooed weaver; the reach of the glass-bead maker to melt a daub on a rod in her oxygen-boosted flame; the glide of the porcelain ceramicist among raw clay, wheel and kiln.

near the writing desk
a little pain much pleasure
migrating monarchs

Some artists never travel more than cycling distance from their seaside homes. But many have visited Alaska and Antarctica, New Zealand and Nigeria. All are in motion now, showing us how they cast a bronze winged statue, rip a grandfather's tattered music book into commemorative collage ribbons, thread strings in a slender just-crafted lute.

the bent jazz notes of someone else's gendai

In each garage or living room or canopied back yard, the discrete red "sold" stickers mark someone has promised to pay the hundreds of dollars asked.

writing
another reading-fee check –
fireflies

The artists create more inventory by day's end: frameable oils and watercolors and pastels; spiral-fan-form silver earrings; charmed bracelets; colored-concrete tables with small live succulents embedded in the glazed-pebble streams snaking across the top.

a poet's morning
adding and then erasing
the grain of beach sand