Passive Architect
Bubble of a Hidden Brook
~
Streams have erased the surface
exposing the rocks below
the land of waterfalls where the
whole lake drains to one rock hole
a focused sense of darkness, streams running
falling, curling, hiding
in the hollows of dark
spaces between rocks
on rocks with a solid blanket
covering of earth above.
Ireland Landscape
~
The land of beautiful landscapes
a variety of them.
Tree arms land on the grass
roads of earth berms
the frogs leap south for winter
red, burnt grasses, wheat
green light and dark black, grey
thick grass that bow to meet the Atlantic
or tufts of grass hanging off jagged islands
ripped away with the tide.
~
The rocky orange Kerry hills
the lapping river banks in
Urban Dublin, misty meadows
in Adare, lipid mountains in Killarney
all of this today meeting the ocean
for Moher.
~~
.
The Giant Green Road
~
Even in the Burren land
places are sectioned off in stacked stone walls
hiking on the skulls
of resting dinosaurs
the heaved up Burren and crossing glaciers
left a bare landscape
algae, bugs and rabbit drippings
soil in the socket holes
slipping through the crack of a backbone
pocketed eyes look toward the water
filtering below into the underground caves
hollowing out the rock below.
~~
.
.
The Manor
~
To the birds the Irish children sing
black birds fly
open arms swings with black drapes
undercut weeping trees
a flat sky
purple clouds reaching a nicely ruined castle.
~
The thundering ocean below
the backside of cliffs
braided hills
criss-crossed low stone walls
up against the roadway
~
Low caves
scaling falls of water
as the tide leaves
trees bend away from the ocean.
~~
Rhododendrons Escape over the Hills
~
Ireland plants take root forever
rhododendrons escape over the hills
a gentleman who was buried at the
Adare Manor with a chestnut
in his pocket warns
over him now grows a
gorgeous shade.
~~
Southern Ireland
~
The peace of thick rivers overgrown
beauty of ancient ground.
~
Trees bending out over the earth
fifteen-foot arms reaching upward
swoops so heavy
I don’t know how they are holding.
~
~
Poison Garden
~
Cast glass faces in isolation
caged in iron lids beside
cat mint, willow and Wolfsbane.
.
Photo by PhilA Burnt Orange Kerry
~
A landscape we got lost to find
overshot the potters shop by
a simple road detour.
~
Heaven-bound sheep and cattle
spray painted to belong to the land
of one Irish man.
~
We spied for a week crawling
highways, The Gap of Dunloe
in the dark past bedtime
the thin lanes between musical
cities and home.
~~
The Blarney House
~
Yews cut in square planes
yellow thread chamaecyparis
a Barrigan house of architecture
at the Blarney house
concealing gardens
before a snack in the warm stable
sitting at a low teachers desk
for lunch
four of us shared soup
and bread with the birds
before walking into the Druid forest
a deep green and magical place of color.
~~
There’s nothing like a well written book to give me a full dose of inspiration. I return to Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer every few years to remind myself again to read slower, seek classic writers, and be more perceptive in the life that surrounds me. 
In the last month I’ve let go of my leadership role in a local book club to focus on books I’ve wanted to read for years. This year I’ll be focusing on reading work to inspire my writing and architecture work.
So, to the Happy New Year I go.
My bookshelves are stocked with the following books:
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Threshold by Shirley Kaufman
Molly MCBean and the Secret Cave by Joanie Murray
Blaise Cendrars Complete Poems
Green-Silver and Silent Poems by Marc Harshman
Complexity and Contradiction by Robert Venturi
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
All thatFeeds Us by Marc Harshman
Virginia Woolf’s essay on Being Ill
The Lacuna by Barbara Kinsolver
A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Professional Practice: Architects
Reveal by Studio Gang Architects
Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs
Chuck Dugan is AWOL: By Eric Chase Anderson
Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
Sample: 100 Fashion Designers (Phaidon Press)
Land of Love and Drowning by T. Vanique
The French House by Don Wallace
The Victorian City by Justin Flanders
The Vacationers by Emma Straub
One Plus One by Jojo Moyes
Thinking Architecture by Peter Zumthor
Cusp: Poems by Jennifer Grotz
David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings by Peter Allison
David Adjaye: Houses; Recycling, Reconfiguring, Rebuilding by Peter Allison
Local Journeys Poems by Marc Harshman
Joseph Albers: To Open Eyes
A Writer’s Reference by Diana Hacker
The Sense of Order by E H Gombrich
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Face of North America by Peter Farb
The Dream of Earth by Thomas Berry
Signs and Seasons by John Burroughs
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Animal Farm by George Orwell
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A Jury of Her Peers by Elaine Showalter
Where I’m calling From: New and Selected Stories by Raymond Carver
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
The Odyssey Translated by Robert Fagles
Sappho: A new Version by Willis Barrstore
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney
Hafez and Rumi (Khajyam and Ghalib)
The Sonnets by W. Shakespeare
Dante: The Divine Comedy, The infernno of Dante by R. Pinskey
Pacific and Other Stories by Mark Helprin
As I Lay Dying and Light in August by William Faulkner
Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
A Portrait of Dorian Gray by Karl Lagerfeld
She Walks in Beauty, Caroline Kennedy on Poetry
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems
Noose and Hook by Lynn Emanuel
a gathering of matter a matter of gathering by Dawn Lundy Martin
Finding Beauty in a Broken World by Terry Tempest Williams
Figure Studies by Claudia Emerson
The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson
Frank Delaney’s Ireland
All Quiet on the Western Front by Enrich Maria Remarque
Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
.
That should be enough to get me through winter, right?
