Jim Tilley

How Little Time, How Long:  Diptych

The Ivy and the Brick

As usual, it was nothing of great consequence
          that made me stop.  This time, ivy grown thick
between columns of windows on a brick building
          that looked a few hundred years old.

It wasn’t the sweat starting to collect at my temples
          and throat, only eight in the morning,
no breeze yet and the hazy air refusing
          to succumb to the sun.  It wasn’t the weight

of the golf bag slung over my shoulder
          as I walked up the path to where my son
would tee off for a tournament.  Just the ivy and brick,
          how little time it takes for ivy

to fill an empty space, how often it must be pruned
          to keep windows clear, and how long
it must have taken to learn how to make brick.
          How necessary the clay and the fire,

and the manual labor before machines.
          How hard we work to build and maintain,
how easily we tear things down; how hard
          it would be to wake to a world blown away,

how much easier to play a round of golf,
          even if it had to be with a hickory shaft
and rusted iron for a club and boiled goose feathers
          covered with bull’s hide for a ball.

▒  ▒

The Clay and the Fire

I see diggers winning clay with hand shovels,
          preparers working and pugging it,

clot molders shaping rough lumps, brick molders
          dashing those into beechwood casts,

trimming the excess with strikes, then stackers
          stacking bricks herringbone in the sun,

edgers with their clappers, stackers again, stacking
          in a hackstead covered with straw.

I see fire in scove kilns, low heat for two days,
          bricks yielding their watersmoke,

intense heat for a week, fireholes bricked over
          for another week, the sorting,

clinkers going to garden paths, the perfectly fired
          to the exteriors of buildings.

And here I walk along a clay path
          toward a brick library to return this book

on the art of making bricks, wondering how long
          it would take to rediscover the art—

if we could, if we would even want to—
          that is, if we lost all our tools and books,

if had we reduced everything to rubble,
          if we could actually do that to ourselves.

 

Jim Tilley: Bio

Jim Tilley: Artist Statement

Diptych after Shelley

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From the Forest Comes the Call

Variations on a Theme by Yeats

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