That these ears would open at an angle to mirror the eloquence of the tree bowing to violin the wind.
Aspiration
Apprentice
Tag: music
Enter Here
With music
Strange angel, admit yourself. The upward reach is not enough where the first teachers are these cave systems writhing, diving beneath these soils, to meet the blind fish in tiny pools, in your undiscovered country still so untamed that it is unafraid to play haunted host to invisible harp. You sing the fine wind plucked from delicate fissures of split rock, and knock again. Come in.
Incant
The open mouth
If it gets so dark
that singing seems
to stop
like a final answer
to that constant question
would you find me
where I wait
in silent suspension
open mouthed or tight-lipped
and remind me back
to music
one faltering note
at a time
to the beginning of the first
song?
Would I know
what lives
at the bottom
of the first
breath to rhyme
with the heights
of the last?
Would it know
me? Could it
enter, even
then?
The Music of the Line
Poet in flight.
Always overdoing it, you rebel at limit, a mutiny barely contained by swing of body, sway of voice, as oceanic symphonies thunder from your deepest ear, to press your thumb against the troubled fold of this opening history that it might yet be smoothed transcendent. Ever the acrobat, you bear the body’s flight into the undulating net of current events in ancient time and hold it there, in the intimate round of your long lens.
The Commuters
What moved us.
And so, we went on, seeking shelter, seeking rest. We were mostly moved by wants––fears too, naturally. We guided our rafts between dangers and needs until the distinctions between shores began to blur.
But sometimes in a quiet hour, there would come a recognition. The want had no end, did it? It was as vast as the sky we beheld at night, and just as impossible to see. It was here and it was forever out of reach. There was nothing to do but move toward it, singing the testimonies of our weaving hearts.
Later, another recognition: nothing survives, does it? No single creature. And yet, we sensed this constant drum at the center of each gathering. Only this luminous moment––yes, even of our death––has any life. We gathered to witness and were moved to move again.
Drumroll
A recollection.
And then came the memory of someone who so loved the world that they could not stop highlighting her face, who at every turn of the gaze would find her silhouette made flesh and lean into its pliant give. Whose ear, tuned to eavesdrop on dream music, would lift a lucid pen and point it toward transcription of the tattered ends of her beloved robes.
Who kept flying home, crying home, and singing her back, the jazz ache of her grief’s webbed movements and polyphonic breaths keeping time with the ancients at the drums, past the trembling where words won’t go, these nested rolls yoked to something just beyond the reach of the given ear, where the pattern of beats becomes so dense that–––
it collapses,
absorbing our cries
back
to some original
sea.
Music for Digging
Thoughts on getting down with it.
Here’s an invitation to stomp through the track-lit hallways of an administration building and sing in a waiting room, wailing exhalations of various shapes.
Consider this a reminder not to chase the light too hard, to balance those ethereal divinities with the ever-present nuisances of daily demons.
Against the weight of daggered baggage, here’s the forgiveness of emptiness. Over the round hoop of the ancient zero like an open mouth, weave a nest for the unborn and make it big enough for the recently departed.
A body will reveal its resilience in rest, holding until only spirit is left, leaving calligraphic marks on the skins it brushed.
Song is a mother. She is working in the dirt and it is everywhere.
***
Inspired by, and with borrowed images from Spencer Kornhaber‘s recent Atlantic article, How to Listen to Björk, According to Björk, regarding the artist’s latest album, Fossora. The title comes from the Latin word for digger.
What Lives
A still, small voice.
My grandmother used to say something about the darkness of hope. How it bears fruit in the light of wisdom. By watching her when she was living and listening after her death, I knew Grace. This was her name.
Revolt against death, she would say, by remembering the dead; the next breath a reminder that it was their breath before a final exhalation. Knowing this, breathe full and long. To forget is to die a little.
There were pages and pages behind these reminders. I read them as survival manuals for creatures of flesh. They said, be poor. Go down. Be despised, love anyway. Serve instead of demanding service.
There were maps too, but no territories. They said only: Look––in hunger and thirst, through long nights and vast deserts. There you will find company with the soul of all souls. You will hear the heartbeat and what follows will be the first song of the world.
You will know it, child. Go down.
Altitude
And the ones who come down.
In another world, everyone lives in the mountains where time falls more slowly. To boast in this world is to speak of the heights you knew, have known, will soon attain. The elites put their houses on stilts.
Only the careless leave the peaks for the valleys, to feel the soft grasses and the waters of the streams and lakes. The people of the heights watch them and scoff at the waste, but sound is denser in the lowlands, so the swimmers cannot hear them––not with the all of the birds and the crickets and the lowland creatures in the grasses and not with the water in their ears. It took them by surprise at first, the noises spilling out of these lowlands.
What’s that? They wondered at first. Later, they knew it was time. The creatures released it. The visitors caught what they could and threw it back. They began to make their own and it was music.
***
Inspired by one of the worlds described in Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, (“26 April 1905”).
Music to Wake the Dead
Orpheus to Eurydice, overheard.
You were tired of tired imitation, wanted something real. Only the unreasonable would do. Okay, I said, and tuned the strings at the joint in the forked paths, from which one would lead home and the other to a forever road. Let me play you a burning thornbush. Your mother floats halfway between the bed and the ceiling in your sleep. We love a riddle, and the ones we can’t solve tend to linger, like the notes of the last dance, like the earth ringing now in my ears.
***
Inspired by a comment that director Andrey Tarkovsky makes in Sculpting in Time. Paraphrasing Paul Valéry, he notes how “the real is expressed most immanently through the absurd.” The last line is adapted from images in Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem “Eurydice.”