Puffins, Ken Larsen, watercolors

Visiting the Polivka family in Paradise. Their daughter was a friend of Ken Larsen’s. The old folks are gone as is the son who sold Ken the VW squareback I painted. Ken said the family sold  the Paradise house a few years ago. Polivka was an aeronautical engineering who fled Czechoslovakia after WWII.

Below, a study of puffins. Every once and a while, we would get buzzed by puffins blown off course. What those arctic pelagic birds thought of Point Reyes National Seashore is anyone’s guess. My grannie loved watching the puffins when she was a child in Bantry. I did these puffins from photos, I guess. I don’t remember.

Ken Larsen's MA Thesis, Art and the Bourgeoise, a dissertation presented on ribbons

Conceptual art piece, Ken Larsen's Thesis, Art and the Bourgeoisie, a hand-calligraphed dissertation presented on silk ribbons attached to a sunhat, and read aloud to his thesis advisor, Bruce Hackett in J St. Park, Sacramento, CA, in May, 1984. I got tired of Ken's procrastination, so I interviewed him, and distilled his dissertation down into a dozen threads. Bruce read the entire dissertation aloud. It took us several walks around the park to complete the process. Ken got his MA.

IN KIND MATCH, and some haiku , Chico

Dear California Arts Council, this is just to say, that after my presentation, for my in-kind match I am deducting the price of a pair of gloves because we stayed too long in the hot pools and got caught in a snowstorm over Yuba Pass. I had to put chains on Ken’s car, because he didn’t know how, and then I couldn’t write for ages afterwards with my poor frozen hands. On the long straight slaughterhouse stretch of Highway 99, we gauged the distance of approaching cars in our lane by measuring how close together the headlights were. We hoped they weren’t in our lane. And we measured the speed of our death accordingly. And after that, I could only think in broken  haiku.

3/12/83

The precision of bird wings 

slicing through the air, 

A  scythe of feathers.

Honey locusts 

looking up through the mouth 

of a cliff to the sky.

Hydrants aching 

for a dog’s leg trickling water 

urging the bladder onward. 

Indian hot Springs, 

Big Bend, Pit River we were hot 

stones floating in the pool.

On I-5, the transparency of trees 

hiding winter’s houses in the hills 

clothed like green brides.

3/12/83