some nice Chekhov passages

From his novella The Steppe:

But when the moon rises, the night becomes pale and dark. It is as if the dusk had never been. The air is transparent, fresh, and warm, everything is clearly visible, and you can even make out the separate stalks of the weeds by the roadside. In the far distance, skulls and stones can be seen....

Broad shadows drift across the plain like clouds across the sky, and in the incomprehensible distance, if you look at it for a long time, misty, whimsical images loom and heap upon each other....It is a little eerie....

The boundless depth and infinity of the sky can be judged only on the sea or on the steppe at night, when the moon is shining. It is frightening, beautiful, and caressing, it looks at you languorously and beckons, and its caress makes your head spin....

...your soul responds to the beautiful, stern motherland, and you want to fly over the steppe with the night bird.

Troika in Steppe, 1882 -- Ivan Constantinovich

going deeper into poetry

While I was off Facebook for two months, I had an anti-epiphany followed by a discovery.


anti-epiphany

Having produced another "book" of poems (In Lieu of Opium), I realized I had run out of steam. I realized how far I am from reaching my ideal of utterance. And even the thought of trying to write another poem began to feel like a bizarre and alien enterprise.

Thinking about my poems, I believe I came close a few times to my ideal of theme, perspective, and execution. Alas, I'm not profound enough to make the kind of poem I want to make. Even describing my ideal seems to be beyond me. I know it when I see it.


discovery

I stumbled upon the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer. I was quietly flabbergasted. Deeply affected. This is it! I want to spend a calm, thoughtful year reading and rereading his poems. I want to spend time living in and between his lines.

And I might want to write little things, from time to time, about his poems. That might be a way for me to gradually formulate and express my ideal about poetry. Whatever I might have to say will not be prescriptivist. It will merely establish the peculiarities of how I experience world-through-art.

A human being!

Yesterday morning, the Direct TV guy came to install a larger dish and an updated box. This fellow was so neat. He was professional and polite. But he was wonderfully peculiar. It was as if unnerving voices were whispering in his head. He projected a tenseness, almost quivering with vague spiritual unease. He was enveloped in a penumbra of distractedness. And he had a clipped, reluctant sense of humor.

I would have enjoyed having a non-Direct TV conversation with this young fellow. But how could I or anyone overcome his internal quivering? Suspicious energies were pouring off him and puddling around his hurried steps. He was efficient. He moved in a nervous blur. He seemed like one of my nightly dream characters come to dubious life.

Afterwards, it struck me that no novel could have prepared me for this Direct TV guy. And no literary critic's exposition could touch his persona. He is of no type. He is himself. No writer could capture the essence of his flustered, vibrating soul. Novels give us characters that are nice to spend time with. Critics try to tease out universals from the interplay of characters and their locations in plot. But real life and real people are different. Real people, like my Direct TV guy, are unique and thoroughly unexpected. No novel could contain him.

I'm glad he came yesterday. He refreshed me with how wild and preposterous is the world.

a remarkable phenomenon

One day in 1995, I had my radio tuned to the classical FM station. A string quartet began playing -- a CD selection from the Takács String Quartet's recording of Haydn's Op. 76 string quartets. I will never forget the impression made on me, not only the brilliant music but also the unique sound of these four players.

This was before I had a computer and access to online ordering of CDs. My local record store didn't have this CD. So I phoned my mother, who lived in the Kansas City area. She went to several stores trying to find this CD for me. Alas, it turned out that this CD from 1990 was out-of-print:






I came across this the other day, about a new traversal of Haydn's quartets by the Takács:


Haydn from The Rest is Noise




What strikes me as remarkable is that, despite the passage of over 20 years and the replacement of the first violinist, this ensemble's sound has remained basically unchanged. It's unique overall timbre remains intact and distinctive. No other string quartet sounds like them.

There is a largeness to the sound. And the first violin still has that slight nasal quality, which is so damn wonderful -- a quality that is almost a color, like rich mahogany.

Haydn was a pure genius of string quartet writing. He took the existing nascent form and shaped it into profound expressions.

Chekhov's characters

Anton Chekhov

I've been reading Chekhov's short stories. I'm impressed by his characterizations. Especially in the story "Enemies."

Kirilov and Abogin are astonishing to me. I won't call it verisimilitude, because I've never known anyone like these characters. For me, it is simply the pleasure of discovering and spending time with new types -- a poor doctor and a rich narcissist. Their portrayals are as transfixing as those by Dostoevsky, maybe more so.

At Abogin's fine house, Kirilov erupts from his state of incomprehension. Abogin, previously respectful and smooth, is taken aback and flares up with umbrage.


Chekhov's "Enemies"

a congruence

I read this evaluation of Tomas Tranströmer's poetry:


Tom Sleigh's evaluation


This sentence, in particular, jumped out at me:

Tranströmer's sense that memories have eyes that look at us from their own vantage point independent of our attempts at remembering insists on the objective quality of the past while acknowledging the contingent nature of memory.


That sentence reminds me of something profound my friend Yael said to me. It was in a different context than memory as such. But the gist is similar. In both cases, a mysterious, embedded significance is to be inferred. Beneath awareness, certain people, impressions, and moments are always "alive." And I think even pieces of our night dreams become second-order memories that take on a kind of independent existence. Those things are always casting glances at us (and thinking about us) from great depths.

I'm pleased to have discovered this congruity: an aspect of Tranströmer's poetry and a consoling insight from my friend.

falling through the tones

Olivier Messiaen's Christian mysticism, which inspired his music, makes no impression on me. The notion of Eschaton has, for me, a vapor of nihilism about it.

So what I get from Messiaen's music is not anchored to religion. Nonetheless, his music does have for me a dreamlike, almost-mystical quality.

Lately, I've been pondering the death of loved ones. Despite all my pondering, I still don't know what it means. Life with their presence has given way to life with pervasive absence. It simply does not compute.

When I listen to this piece of music by Messiaen, something odd happens to me: my anguished pondering ceases. I simply fall through the tones of this haunting score. My sadness and incomprehension are stunned into a kind of indifference. Or a stupefaction. The sense of it is something like a dream. A brief transcendence. As if memory and time itself are falling between the notes...toward a realm of muted sighs.

Mieczysław Weinberg

About Weinberg

Fragments of the unknown 8th? Oh, my....

Sibelius: The Rest is Noise



Listen: fragments of the 8th

Tranströmer -- subtle visionary

Ross Shideler on Tomas Transtromer

My mind is fully blown by Tranströmer's poetry. It represents the ideal for me.

I used to write poems. I carved out my own style and voice, found my way into certain themes. But deep-down, I knew there was an ideal form of utterance that I could not achieve, a way of grasping existence, memory, and wonder with perfect words and subtle images. I am lacking the talent and sensibility to approach that ideal in my own work. My lines are too expressive.

I know that my ideal has to do with the strangeness of the “out there” and not about the vicissitudes or neuroses of the “in here.”

Tranströmer is somehow able to do this effortlessly. It's probably innate genius. In his work, the concrete is hallowed by an implied metaphysical resonance. The understatement is, paradoxically, revelatory and shattering.

My mind is blown by Tranströmer's poems.

Tomas Tranströmer

I am very late coming to his work. I don't know how I didn't know about his work.

I am becoming mesmerized by his poetry. It is significant to me. It is an aesthetic wonder. My synapses are becoming Tranströmerized.

I just had to announce this fact. Later, I hope to write a few comprehensible sentences of appreciation.

music is the deepest language

I really like this lovely movement by Sibelius:

reading Nabokov

I've been reading his short stories. Some of them are really cool. I'll write something here about one of those stories – “Cloud, Castle, Lake.”

Here, we have a neurotic protagonist – Vasiliy Ivanovich -- who is caught in a web of tensions, the fibers of which are oppressive and transcendent, portentous and hopeful. He wins a ticket for a vacation outing, from the “Bureau of Pleasantrips.” It is compulsory, so we have entered Kafkaesque terrain. Neat. This is going to be good.

Along the train journey, he catches faint glimpses of his dream. Of a daydream long suppressed, practically forgotten. As things between him and his traveling companions deteriorate, the impression grows stronger in him that his desire is near. He steals away from his tormentors and discovers a house -- a rustic inn -- set amid natural allurement. This is it! A simple room, austere. Outside the window, an environment of idyllic beauty, perpetual wonder. Images to stand in for an untouchable ideal. This is where he shall abide forever, free of world and people.

But it's not to be. He is found out and nearly beaten to death by his fellow vacationers. Desire is frustrated, on the cusp of heaven.

I usually prefer to get lost in a good story and not dwell on meanings and themes. Especially an odd story with moments of evocative prose that seem to happen just for me. But this remarkable piece inspires me to wax “philosophic.”

Inside certain neurotic individuals, an ember glows stubbornly. It burns from early to elder age. It is a secret ember that casts a faint, dubious light into the ordinary world of experience. A desire for the perfect phase, the perfect mode, the perfect one. Something or someone to explain the heart's unease and make it well. But this desire is not made of the world's stuff. When it comes into contact with quotidian, earthbound consciousness, it is revealed to be a heretical thing. It does not compute on the plane of convention and normality. It is of a different and unreal substance. That suppressed, unrealizable desire is a form of madness. To believe one has found Paradise (or a sufficient substitute) – how else could that situation end except in disaster?

assertions

Language is equal parts logic and magic.

Poetry is where the dynamics of both things work together to open up significant moments.

Poetry is a complex of semantics and séance.

A new experience can happen with a poem, as profound as the inspiring material. Occasionally, profounder.

Metaphors can create an unusual state of mind in the reader.

A poet can present something almost beyond words in terms of simile, personification, and mixed resonance. The shadow of what is elusive casts a coloration onto the page.

The poet performs a linguistic conjuring. The poet summons the ghosts of words that hide in equivocal regions between time and emotion.

"Among the Russians"

I wish I could have been there. I would have been quiet. I would have had nothing substantial to contribute to the conversation. But I would have appreciated listening to what the others said.



Prospect Magazine -- "Among the Russians"

poetry is important stuff

Tomas Tranströmer -- a poet -- has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.


Here is an article: Tranströmer in Haaretz


Here is a link to two of his poems, which I like: Tranströmer poems


At some point, I might have rambling thoughts to express about his poems.

Strolling through my head...

Sometimes, I amble through the inside of my skull, to take a look at the vast, odd corners of my mind. It astounds me to consider that all of us peculiar talking anthrodpoids have such infinite dimensions teeming within our heads. What I'm getting at is, for me, something not quite biological or philosophical. The best word I can come up with is "mystical." That word is usually a place-holder for “what is unknown.” I happen to think that mind is a mystical chamber echoing with fractal abysses. Not only unknown, but unknowable. It pleases me to pronounce that something is unknowable. It makes me feel sort of profound, in a way that typically profound people would never understand. At Oxford, important folks are going on and on about the nature of consciousness – whether it is a “hard problem” or whether it is something that neuroscience will eventually light up. Or maybe a Darwinian effusion of adaptive and cultural dynamics. Blah, blah, blah. I prefer to think of consciousness (what a riddle – “to think of consciousness”) as the inside texturing of the Great Dark-Purple Pumpkin.

My brother lives and works in Nashville. He always eats lunch on the institutional premises. The other day, unusually, he joined a friend for a walk during lunch break. (Keep in mind that this never happens.) They walked through the pleasant autumn day, the air temperate to coolish, the trees beginning to change into subdued colors of clothing. A day vibrating with expectation and ineffable impressions. They began strolling across the picturesque river bridge, when my brother noticed an odd creature on the opposite side, walking in the opposite direction.

This person stuck out like a surreal apparition in the pristine noontime, like a sore thumb or a weathered, quixotic chimpanzee holding a lit stick of dynamite. He catches the attention, shall will say? He wore sunglasses.

Of all things!....he began crossing to my brother's side of the bridge, angling straight toward him. “What?!” thinks my brother, “This is going to be an unwarranted and probably unpleasant encounter.”

This tallish, pony-tailed, graying, side-burned human structure walked right up to my brother. They both removed sunglasses and looked at one another. It was Professor Unusual! (name changed for privacy).

This fellow had not been seen my by brother for a few years. This fellow lives in another city, where he teaches geology. He was visiting Nashville and was strolling across the bridge, out for a spontaneous lark. Strolling to where he and my brother became swept up into a Jungian vortex of synchronicity.

Back in El Dorado days (south Arkansas, where we and Professor Unusual had grown up), this fellow was one of my brother's best friends. We lived on the east side (odd, insular, proletariat). “Unusual” lived on the north side (eccentric, extra-spatial, “aristocratic”). He and his brother were (are) not typical human beings. Both their IQ ratings would probably be unmeasurable (on the plus side). I'll not bore you with my vague remembrances of those strange earlier days. I'll just note that everything back then was a chronic mystery and that El Dorado was an incubator of the subtly outlandish.

So...what does my thinking about my head and consciousness have to do with Professor Unusual's eruption into improbable circumstance? Nothing, really.

I think I'm merely struck by the fact that I have become a rather dumbfounded recluse – some guy who spends too much time thinking about stuff. Whereas, Professor Unusual was out for a preposterous stroll, soaking up even more extra-spatial, other-dimensional influences. In other words, he represents a contrast. A tallish, pony-tailed, graying, side-burned, and geological entity. A sort of action figure moving through the matrices of the inexplicable. Through a ritual of autumn-suffused contract with reality.

Her Eyes

Words & music copyright -- Tim Buck
All parts on this demo -- also me









Her Eyes

Breath arrested, my heart skipped a beat.
She was standing in a restaurant.
Could not take my eyes off that scene,
and I don't even know where it was.

I had to pinch myself to see if I were dreaming.
How could this happen right here, right now?
Why did she have to be so beautiful,
for crying out loud?

And those eyes, those eyes, those eyes.

Her picture is burned into my brain,
an image seared into my heart.
I'm wounded, but I welcome the pain.
It feels like a great work of art.

I want to hear her talk, hear her laugh, but
she's just standing in a mute photograph.

Her eyes are infinite, I think she even sees me.
Her eyes are beacons for secret harboring.
Her eyes are serious but also smiling.

I know she is far beyond me.
I would have melted right on the spot.
Had I been there, I'd have been spluttering
my wine in that restaurant.

But you can't take that picture from me.
I will hide it in my heart's treasure trove.
I'll pretend that shadow cross her brow means
she's sad that I love

those eyes, those eyes, those eyes.

That photo speaks of melancholy,
of something like tears behind her eyes,
of something deep, not to be
disturbed by a prying mind.

Nevertheless, I want to know how she thinks,
but she's just standing where that shutter blinked.

Her eyes are exquisite, they shine with dark mystery.
Her eyes are knowing, is she lookin' back at me?
Her eyes are not hurtful but I'm still hurting.

the question

She likes to walk in the old cemetery
on weekdays when others are living.
If a sudden rain breaks through sunshine,
the summer elm and oak leaves make music.
If sudden rain does not break through sunshine,
the silence is a muffled voice of great irony.

Others in the city carry too much gravity.
They weigh down moments with talking,
and they look too hard through eye colors.
They are living and it is a horrible thing
to carry one's bones around so naturally!
The colors of their eyes are almost painted.
Do they blink? Eyes can be so alarming, noisy.
They make her small notebook tremble blankly.

But here the bones are very still.
And flowers left in remembrance
are simply dreaming in sunshine,
left by creatures who quickly fall
back into grimaces and laughter.

Here among those with better manners,
she will stop to sketch an imagined poem
of dragon winds perplexing the Gobi night.

Sonja of the golden rooms

Where she is slides off any earthly map.
Sonja of the far place is almost smiling,
her aura tinted in shades of rare element.

Sonja sighs with music and blinks with irony.
Silks of golden hue hang like whispers of time --
are draped around her chamber of unusual being.
She lives in a room of passing-through phantoms.
Translucent drawings of impossible contraptions
drift through the quiet space of Tesla-tingling air.
A smile will bloom then fade then bloom again,
a curvature of amused lips from her thinking.

Behind her eyes is a world of oceans.
And she wrings dooms from moisture
of nightfall -- she blows it into a bubble,
a secret golden bubble inside which to fly.

I have seen her standing quietly for hours
in a corner of shadows, there without reason,
just there in dark-bouillon shadows, uncannily.

Sonja of the golden rooms is beyond my words,
no narrative will bring or halt her poised arrival.

I think I have seen her standing in aloofness --
but an ambiance of sharing blooms in shadows.
I think she passed through me to convey a riddle
without words – “You are not cured, thank god.”

Souls are beyond all science and metaphysics.
They come through vents of the molten elemental.

in lieu of opium

Some moments appear longer than moments,
and they are taller than any scaffolding of time.
To slip into the creases of such vertical durations
is to move past the present, toward a dark mystic.
In lieu of opium, succor of some kind must be had.

In lieu of opium, music opens the spaces between wondering and hurting.

There is a space of objects, colored in sounding shades
that will open like a liquid door, that will open darkly.
A space of hypnotic tones climbing, swaying, falling.
A moment of objects can open made of a few notes,
a moment drunken on curious rhythm, piquant harmony,
a moment of objects forming an abstract picture of hope...
and in lieu of opium, one can fall into the sighs of music.

Because music is invisible it is bountiful.
Paradise teems and beckons in a measure.
When there is something that can't be spoken,
the sense of it shimmers implicitly in timbres.

In lieu of opium, one can listen to wounds opening and smile with pleasure.


But when music begins to hurt instead of halo,
one may blend words into the narcosis of a poem.

Nafplion (for Regina Bou)

Nafplion, Greece

Today she will drive to the old town,
the beautiful town beside the sea.
Light will fall gracefully into her eyes.
Pomegranate air will breathe into her,
as gods whisper to Pre-Socratic spirits.
And colors will tumble down hillsides.

Today will not be ordinary.

The weight of stone a reassurance.
The feel of fitted stones underfoot
and the slant of orange roof tiles
bright in the afternoon sunshine
will soothe wild forms of mind.

And she comes because this old town
juts like a big thought into the blue bay.
She comes because this town falls back
and onto slopes, in the grammar of a poem.
She has arrived to see Nafplion dreaming
so far above the blue timeless water.

It is far from an ordinary day
when a large-eyed seer stands
amid the alabaster sighs of time,
within an old town beside the sea.

It is a solemn mystery to ponder her
pondering impressions of the Aegean.

She comes because she is living
and the dead will write her a poem.

an evening in Appalachia

This quaint town does not exist.
How perfect is that? So let's walk
and talk of how it is to be Southern.
 
I'm a stranger 'round these parts,
so I'm glad you are here with me.
Let's stroll these nightfallen streets,
outside of time and just within reach.
 
Mountains lean back and bring dark to dark.
The town is lit with eerie lanterns of fireflies.
Hawkers of trinkets and fablers of folk songs
laugh in the rough-sawn Shenandoah bazaar.
 
I have plenty of crumpled Confederate dollars,
so I'll buy you a piece of West Virginia coal –
consider it a diamond in the purity of potentia.
 
We speak the same language, a slurred gothic potion,
a twang of piney syllables, drawled out like dog yawns.
I could speak some fine gibberish as half-chortled words.
You would understand the subtext and flavors of wounding.
 
Let's drink some moonshine made of secrecy and dewfall.
We'll touch our mad fruit jars then walk in drunken circles.
 
We could dance a slow twist
on the train station platform,
while waiting for the smoke
of a lost gypsy locomotive.
They're smuggling Tom Waits
for a midnight music séance.
We'll present Libra tarot cards
as tickets to the magic table.
 
Later on, let's not say anything to frighten the owls.
Let's marvel at age gaps and the mystery of kinship
 
or simply burn time under great aching mountains.

letter to Nabina Das

How could I know the shapes of souls
who peer out from northeastern eyes?
Or touch the fabric of days unfurling
along Brahmaputra River, beyond me?

It is all mysterious and puzzling.

Verandah roses and Palash trees blooming
send essences, oils as keepsakes into houses.
And many-thousand years breathe in dialects.

The rich silken colors that have played
amid your years of singing and dancing
through symbols hiding in folk legends --
even my reveries lack the conjuring,
and I drift on winds of my pale words.

So I have no way of knowing how it is
that you emerged from ancient depths.
Was it the gleam in your father's eyes
that spoke wryly to you of imbalances?

Beyond architecture and sea breezes lie mudflats and the salt of tears.

In some slow communion with the people,
you took them into the temple of language --
a fathomless touching of their hard tales.

Used tools hanging in peasant sheds
teem with energies of earth and rice,
their worn handles elegies of poverty.
Fields and the mists that haunt them
give up their dead tillers, a dawn sigh.

You work them into lines of hard beauty.

You speak them into tribute and apotheosis,
clothe them in the living linens of free verse.

The forgotten people of India move in slow rhythm
against the counterpoint of greed and social injury.
When old ones and wide-eyed children of hot days
are broken under callous yokes, forfeiture, seizure,
young men and women seek communal elevations
to shelter amid red scarves and crossed bullet belts,
may stake blood on a mountain under Hegelian suns.

How could I know the shape of India?
But I have felt poems of human lives.


On the bank of Brahmaputra River at sunset,
your songs hang on the weary and godly air.



Nabina's blog

openings (for Janet)

Her selection of pigments glistens on a palette,
pigments vibrating in rhythms of probability --
stochastic atoms of colors matching synapses.

The canvas seems infinite, a white ground bass.
And music will complement her morning brushes --
Scriabin or Miles? Chopin or Tom's 3/4 cadence?
Ah...Debussy will spread his elusive prismatics!

What will emerge?

It's not for me to know how she opens the portals of dream and vision.

But phantoms come, and forms of feeling
become masses hanging in strange balance.
Deep fall the eyes into that opening rendered.
Wild is the way that spirits clothe themselves
in chromatic meaning, then aesthetically whisper
into the pensive Moment haunting brushed fabric --
melancholia and suspense, death and wan Eros.

It's not for me to call this magic or miracle of color between now and numinous.

Or...a muted drama of black ink and charcoal
performing metamorphosis in titanium white.

Objects without name are apparitions
made of what this painters is feeling,
in hues wrought from mineral silence
to uncover modes of arcane space.

A slow grinding of intuitions into image opiums.
A grinding of elements into immanent powders,
releasing powers of shaman, seer, oracle.

Sienna, umber, ochre, madder.
Cobalt, chrome, cadmium, copper.
And the blues! -- brilliant or nocturnal.
All for alchemy transmuting incantations
that sigh in violet or simmer in alizarin.

A spellbound mixing of slow ecstatic oils
into inspiration, dark-gleaned discovery,
bringing affective texture to presence.


But sometimes I do wonder...
just what is happening underneath
this paint and these ghostly forms?

If I stared too long, if eyes fell too deeply,
I might see too much, go mad inside layers.

DESIRE

BLACK SLEEP

CONNECTIONS

NOW WAIT JUST A MINUTE

VIOLENCE

DARK FLOWER

All images the property and copyright of Janet Snell.

the well-tempered translator (for Yael)

This large stillness is not oppressive.
It wraps around her like delicate lace,
with moments holding rich suspense,
as intuition weaves its arabesques.

She has her gleaming wine, her old pen,
and notebook waiting flashes to white pages.
The table is solid, will support new thoughts.
Her laptop is patient for what will happen.

And her silent incantation spreads discipline
onto all the objects in this room of held time --
objects now guarding her ripe mood with auras.

Her temperament is suited to keys of language.
Just like in earlier days she would dance fingers
across the timbred colors of classical piano --
even Bach and his intricate mysteries fathomed!
That characteristic way of speaking variations.

Her poised soul is suited to nuances of Russian.
She has breathed that air of tales and wounding.
Her natural ear sensitive to grammar's music,
as she lived with English for another source.
Into ancient Hebrew she will cast her authors --

the mastered texts of masters will dream through her giftedness.

Opening doors between systems of saying.
That is a mission of work that she loves.
Locating transport for poems in their travel.
That is an art known to one who has ventured.

Bach found a system for compromised tuning,
so the spectrum of keys was even, well-tempered.
The ear would adjust to eccentricities of overtones,
and the ear gain fullness of keyboard expression.


In the pause of moments when choices are trembling,
she reaches into language and plays airs on strings.

early...

At 5:30 AM today, the morning had just begun to apricot the sky. I leapt (sort of) into my car and went for a little drive. I rolled down the windows, in a manner of speaking. I went for a drive just because. And also because I wanted to feel the texture of morning air spiraling around my head. My brain was mostly empty. But it quickly filled with a thousand subconscious impressions. And with things beyond the condition of being resolved.

My brain went blank again, as I drove along stupefied at 40 mph. Going nowhere, just going. Then my awareness bent toward poetry. I remembered a poem that I post every three or four months, since two years ago. It was written by Connie Stadler. For me, it is one of the best poems I've encountered. If I could write a poem of this exquisite, time-altering quality, I would purchase champagne and dance in slow motion.

I always want to write a bunch of stuff, to explain why this poem is wonderful. But who cares about me blathering a bunch of stuff? Even if I could decipher its secret code and explicate its affective beauty, what would that even mean? It exists quite well just as it is, in itself, without my embellishments.


I dream, now...

In the forest of blue heron
On the whitest of white nights
The moon clouds pass
As laden caravanserai.
Cedar shadow calligraphy
Communicates what no human can
Cygnets sleep in sepia wash
In fearless surrender.
Darkness and I stroll among these
gardens within myself.
Sip wine, exchange no thoughts.


Copyright © 2009 -- Constance Stadler

tiny opera (in Sprechstimme)

Maria Fatima! Maria Fatima!
I have come on freeing winds
and through the seams of words.
You hold thousands of pieces
of phenomena in thralldom.

It is August but I wander
a Winterreise of cold fogs,
like Schubert's lad singing
his Lindenbaum to vision
for ears that see soundings.

So let us make new songs with intuitive lips,
here where we sit on this tree-shaded bench.
We'll frighten passersby with bending pitches
and strange sayings -- a folk tune staggering
in drunken beats and cross-rhythm carrying
a melody of metaphysics, minor-keening
to suggest odd beauty on atonal richness.

Oh, Maria Fatima!...I sing of great sadness,
just to hear you laugh, unveiling your counsel.
It makes me so happy to fall into darkness.
It makes me so sad to smile at dark flowers.

Silence! Maria Fatima is speaking with her eyes!
She is sighing a golden-throated, implicit language:

"Yes, loved ones die and friends disappear.
And Weltschmerz is made for one pure tear.
But the cuckoo coos with his linden tones,
and texture of wood is much like our bones.
We pause for wonder and that is worth space.
Questions are born to breathe in rain's grace.
Songs of speaking are dreams of curved light
falling through octaves of limbs' painful height.
I see you have brought your old stringless guitar.
So strum me to Portugal on one half-tuned bar."

Oh, Fatima, Maria Fatima...such ease you have given me.
The weight of my years melts in fire between shadows.

"Yes, good...now go to the corner and fetch me pomegranates."




[Sprechstimme -- speech-voice, a cross between speaking and singing. Arnold Schoenberg made use of it, as did Leoš Janáček.]

August 19, 2011

A prison cell door clanging shut
is a sobering sound anywhere.

But here in Arkansas that tone cracks veneers
of time in a distinctive manner. A certain shock
that shakes out all the ghosts hiding in objects
will also quake what others take for granted.
The girls who sing in choirs and then kiss smiling
will fade. And the long afternoons of cool oblivion
will leave you behind, will go to twilight without you.

That door clangs like a crow on the Delta,
cracking the moon in a scream of feathers.

If you are young and different and found guilty,
if gothic shadows hang around your shoulders,
if you are found wanting, chained, forgotten...
infinite moments of the living dream will shatter.
And somethng uncanny will settle on your brow --
an injury that only a Job might discuss with you.

Things will get so real that any god would have gone mad.
The texture of humor and hope will stiffen into a leathering.

So...they now release you. After 18 years. Innocent, even against the law.


The world turns. Yet time is stunned on your quiet voice.