my dripping brain

the island dweller (for David Bentley)

2012-02-09T05:38:00.000-08:00

Canada curls over and winks quietly
at San Juan Island in the Northwest.
The island is six miles by twelve.

San Juan lies here with other islands –
forests and meadows dream over water.

He steps from the ferry to town dock.
Glad to be home from the mainland.

He dwells here under passacaglia rhythms
of clouds above melancholias of sea birds.
The winds that blow blow from China,
bring chants and ghosts from Manchuria.

He dwells in the heart of Friday Harbor town,
with his buddha smile, goatee, and spectacles.
On weekends he'll be found in the open air,
strolling galleries or considering antiques.

Rare ones live without questioning the weather.
In the nursing home, he worked decades tenderly,
answering eyes with companionship and easement.

He is so far from Arkansas and so away in time.
I knew him back then before he found paradise,
before he came to sea wind and olde shoppes.

I'm glad he is there in that strange place.
I'm glad he is sane just like he used to be.
Remembering him, I tumble into far years
jumbled with islands of days without dying.

A scribbler of lines is not sane and is no buddha.
He is memory, distance, and a beautiful psychosis.

Kaprálová -- "April"

2012-02-07T15:40:00.000-08:00

I listen to this because I like listening to it.

I adore the music of Vítězslava Kaprálová. This "April" Prelude is played by Antonin Kubalek. The tone of this piano! The touch of these fingers on the keys!

And I like the idea that April in Arkansas feels like April in Czechoslovakia (or wherever she was when she composed this -- somewhere "over yonder"). I can smell fresh grass after gentle rain...intuit early flowers...and there! -- the first butterfly!

Under the spell of these purling, daydreaming notes, I will also think about the atmosphere of a gentle friendship.......

"April"

colors of Huckleberry

2012-02-07T15:39:00.000-08:00

I came late to THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. I was in my thirties. I remember the unusual effect it had on me, apart from narrative, theme, plot, characterization. The only other time I've had a similar unusual reaction was when I listened one day to orchestral excerpts of Wagner's RING cycle. In the latter case, I heard the music in deep yet vibrant colors. With ole Huck, I was reading in colors -- rich, swirling hues of nightshade purple, black-cat black, and shimmering indigo. Especially the sense of indigo -- I could almost taste it. One day, I need to get my head examined.

Miriam Louie Brown

2012-02-07T15:37:00.000-08:00

Miriam, Miriam, Miriam –
can't one simply wade into
the liquid lapping of syllables
that caress the Dead Sea shore?...

until American slang goes dim
and rock and roll slides off hips,
until this dancing girl is silk-robed
within a tent under awes of Judea?...

Miriam, Miriam, Miriam –
it echoes with uncanny time.
A sirocco whispers to nightfall
when flute, lyre, and soft drum
blend into low psalm of augury....
strange sad music of ancients
laden with portent of catastrophe.

Miriam, Miriam, Miriam –
a name like moonlight on bloom.
It is good the vine is still blooming.
This name continues the old tale
of mystery and ark and sunlight
touching dove wing after long storm....

of covenant and golden arkwood
and the dew of tears always on it.

This was written by me, and I approve of this poem. :)

a Mahler thing!

2012-02-07T15:35:00.001-08:00

From my friend Andrea, who lives in Austria:

Bekijk de video in andere formaten.

arrival

2012-02-06T10:54:00.000-08:00

it's certainly not
a network of contacts
it's certainly not
an academic circle
it's certainly not
finding a sponsor
it's certainly not
amplified recitation
it's certainly not
a free market at work
it's certainly not
dazzling advertisement
and it's certainly not
accolades and prizes

a poem is all by itself
it sucks or it doesn't
all by itself a poem might shine

the world has been shocked
by a great poem from silence
even if the world doesn't know
where this shock has come from
or that a shock has even happened

language has cracked open the tombs that hold the dead lives of all dark atoms

a great poem has pushed world into World
beauties that sting wound for the wounding

[I'm always a stickler for puncuation and capitalization; I don't know what happened here.]

Ezra Pound -- "Exile's Letter"

2012-02-05T12:55:00.000-08:00

“Exile’s Letter”

Michelangeli -- Debussy's "Reflets dans l'eau"

2012-02-05T12:54:00.000-08:00

Leonard Cohen

2012-02-05T12:47:00.000-08:00

Neil was groovy in 1967

2012-02-05T12:45:00.000-08:00

The Grosse Fugue (orchestral)

2012-02-05T12:44:00.001-08:00

Moravec -- Chopin

2012-02-01T08:58:00.000-08:00

Czech pianist Ivan Moravec is a master poet of the piano. I've admired him for years. Such a spherical tone, even into the mid-range and bass! He instills his Chopin interpretations with an atmosphere of solitude. A shadowed depth opens somehow between each note. This is musicality on another level.

Lara St. John -- Bach

2012-02-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

There are virtuoso violinists who are impressive. Then there are the rare ones, whose serious musicality flows from dedicated and deep aesthetic currents. That sets them apart. Their tonal generation and control, as well as rhythmic subtlety, are astonishing.

Brendel -- Mozart

2012-02-01T08:51:00.000-08:00

Viktoria Postnikova Moscow 1970

2012-02-01T08:48:00.000-08:00

Oh, my........

The unreal world of Alfred Schnittke

2012-02-01T08:45:00.000-08:00

Richter -- Ravel

2012-02-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

Dang...........!

Songs from Bruno Schulz's THE STREET OF CROCODILES

2012-02-01T08:38:00.000-08:00

Valentina Lisitsa -- Liszt

2012-02-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

Valentina Lisitsa -- Chopin

2012-02-01T08:34:00.000-08:00

This gal has a phenomenal technique and a large repertoire. She astonishes in the brilliant, extrovert pieces. I almost want to be grumpy when it comes to such technique applied to so many varieties of scores. I want to think she must be a tiny bit lacking in the subtlest aspects of musicality. But as the Chopin below proves, she conjures pure poetry. She must be some kind of real live genius. I just don't know what else to say.....

paroxysm

2012-01-31T18:39:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the back side of eyes open.
Lids of memory lifting for a moment.
Long enough to glance at tableaux
in full swing of happening long ago.

A luminescence there from eyes?
Or from the glow of intenser time?

A father is filling up a radiant space
with his lion-certain love and strength.

He is now dead.

A mother is moving in a biblical grace
of psalm lived out through her caring.

She is now dead.

Sometimes the back side of eyes open,
but only for an instant of remembering.

Then they slam shut before they go blind.

a capricious and delightful score

2012-01-31T12:02:00.000-08:00

"November Woods"

2012-01-31T10:15:00.000-08:00

Hamelin plays Medtner

2012-01-31T10:13:00.000-08:00

In the Mists

2012-01-31T10:11:00.000-08:00

Some beautiful pianism by Rudolf Firkušný, projecting the unusual moods of this Janáček composition.

Sometimes...

2012-01-31T10:10:00.000-08:00

...I will walk to the little bridge that spans the cotton field drainage ditch. Both banks are overgrown with small trees and gnarly stuff. The water averages about three feet in depth. This slow stream averages about 25 feet in width.

When I stand on the bridge and peer down, there is a creature standing in the shallows. A long-beaked, long-legged, loony-looking thing. It's like he's waiting there for me to look down at him. So he can take off in pterodactyl flight, straight down the waterway and just barely above the surface. And there is something forlorn and forsaken about this wingéd, feathered beast.

Prokofiev -- Violin sonata No 1. Part III

2012-01-31T10:01:00.000-08:00

Galina Vishnevskaya

2012-01-31T09:59:00.000-08:00

Galina Vishnevskaya -- oh, my goodness gracious. Her voice! I'm fond of several lyric sopranos, but this voice! It is rock-solid. I've never heard anything like this before in a singer. Her expressive intrepidity. And how she inhabits this Russian stuff! -- Mussorgsky's "Songs and Dances of Death" seems to be part of her spiritual DNA here.

If you click on the "Show More" thing, a drop-down section contains the Russian lyrics, with English translation following.

Paul Lewis -- Schubert's Piano Sonata D. 959

2012-01-31T09:57:00.001-08:00

As far as I'm concerned, this performance by Paul Lewis is perfect. Technically and poetically. This sonata is beyond the beyond.

Lazar Berman -- Liszt's Piano Sonata

2012-01-31T09:55:00.000-08:00

Well...color me amazed. I couldn't find Paul Lewis's great recording on Youtube (which is one of the best, owing to his long-arched conception bringing coherence to the musical semantics). But I spotted this by Lazar Berman. I'd never heard it. I was curious. It has a different feel than the Lewis one, and it made my hair jump up and my eyeballs spin. He takes CHARGE of this sonata! And his playing reminds me a little of Richter, in the way measures are isolated for intensest retrieval of musical possibility. That is a different approach than Lewis's more holistic traversal.

Valentin Silvestrov -- Symphony No. 5

2012-01-31T09:32:00.000-08:00

I really, really like to get myself lost inside Silvestrov's music. I "go" to places that have no location, yet are teeming with surreal and vital significance. There is an austere beauty here......

Claudio Arrau -- Schubert's Piano Sonata D. 960

2012-01-31T09:30:00.000-08:00

SCHUMANN - Symphony No.1 "SPRING"

2012-01-31T09:27:00.000-08:00

Mieczyslav Weinberg -- Violin Sonata

2012-01-31T09:26:00.000-08:00

Cziffra -- artistry on an exalted level

2012-01-31T09:04:00.000-08:00

"Mourned by the Wind"

2012-01-31T09:03:00.000-08:00

Schubert's FANTASY (part 3)

2012-01-31T09:00:00.000-08:00

I'm so excited, I can hardly stand it. I finally found a performance of Schubert's FANTASY that is acceptable to me. The violin part for this piece is so difficult that almost all violinists sound like they are sawing across the splintered nerves of a wounded weasel.

Repin is beyond belief. How does he do it? This isn't possible! The amber-hued timbre he conjures is thoroughly solid. And Lugansky plays the piano part here like it should be played -- as a fully equal partner.

And beginning at 1:23 -- that noble, stirring section! It is done superbly.

The Needle's Eye from Kris Saknussemm's REVEREND AMERICA

2012-01-31T08:57:00.000-08:00

Ernst Krenek -- Sonata for Harp

2012-01-31T08:51:00.000-08:00

Gilels -- Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata -- Part 3

2012-01-31T08:48:00.000-08:00

After listening to this, I got to thinking about other Gilels things I have on CD. I got to thinking about Emil Gilels. Musicality on this level is astounding. What is it with the Russians? Note perfect, yes. But it's something else. A kind of sprung flair, a bounded apotheosis, a rhythmic uniqueness, a natural expressiveness that happens in séance with the score. That does not distort the score. But adds life to life. In short, a respectful audacity. It is Gilels and Richter, others. When you hear it, you know it's a Russian master. I don't know what else to say.

Dusan Djukaric -- watercolor artist

2012-01-31T08:41:00.000-08:00

Dusan Djukaric -- watercolor artist

Discovering the watercolors of Dusan Djukaric has been a kind of "homecoming" for me. How else to put it, when I answer, naively, a somehow familiar beckoning from these painted worlds? The images align with strands of my aesthetic DNA. A timelessness of mood re-calls childhood. The rain and the light create an ontology.

They don't strike me as mere depictions of cityscapes and waterscapes. I detect a poet at work. Into the scenes is painted a complex emotion, and that discharge of sensibility is retrievable by the viewer. For me (am I only projecting?), a subtle melancholy and existential wonder emerge from the forms and colors.

I like these watercolors so very much.

I am going to look at these paintings until I become slowly, deeply, and gently unhinged.

An article about his work

Vítězslava Kaprálová

2012-01-31T08:27:00.000-08:00

Kapralova's string quartet (Con brio)

Not only what is obvious here -- the music's exuberant dance and quixotic song -- but what is implicit -- the composer's excellence and volume of consciousness.

Nathan Milstein

2012-01-31T08:25:00.000-08:00

His violin playing has meant a lot to me over the years.

The Street of Crocodiles -- Bruno Schulz

2012-01-31T08:21:00.000-08:00

The city of Drohobycz -- now in Ukraine, then Poland. That other Drohobycz can still appear. It can emerge from a certain slant of light, or from within an evening's oblique mood. Indistinctly, figures appear inside equivocal time, fantastical being.

The Street of Crocodiles -- Amazon.com

Natalia Osipova at 17, Esmeralda variation

2012-01-31T08:19:00.000-08:00

Jacques Brel

2012-01-31T08:17:00.000-08:00

Natalia Osipova

2012-01-31T08:13:00.000-08:00

I don't know much about ballet. I know I like to watch it. I like to think I have an instinctive knack for recognizing quality when I see, hear, or read it. At least it makes me feel good to think that.

Although I'm ignorant about the technical things an expert would notice, Natalia Osipova strikes me as a phenomenal talent. To me, her dancing seems graceful, dynamic, expressive. Her physical strength is amazing.

The wonder of human presence is implicit for me in her performance of kinetic, gestural art.

I read where she is no longer with the Bolshoi Ballet. She is now with the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg.

the art museum

2012-01-28T20:30:00.001-08:00

Ascending the Greek drama of very wide steps
that seem granite in western Kansas City.
Eventually facing doors of mood-harming glass.
Inside, complex halls of frames holding paintings.

Others are milling about and appear too real.
Why are they so solid and what are their lives?

Afternoon enjoyment is wounded by the mere attempt.
Octagonal rooms, blithe mocking light, people with gravity.
A cigarette would taste or be good before facing a painting.

Here is something from the Barbizon School.
But the white flecks suggesting wildflowers
in the lazy French countryside of older time
are just too much to look at, and they injure!
Are those flecks rather hints of bone in grasses
of a meadow growing wild in hours of forgetting?

Cracked open light and lavender garden shadows
impress with brushed audacity, and neurotc irises
receive too much of presence and of beauty.

Here is an Edvard Munch, so quiet in dark hues.
An alluring woman stands before an evening lake.
The contours of refined melancholy and volumes
of eccentric expression should please a casual visitor.
But in this viewing, a drama of great hushed crisis --
that young woman smiling a poem breaks into time,
leaving presentiment of a face in the future, a visage
and distant voice become real in later haunted days.

It's time to leave now, drive away in crestfallen colors.

Things have come to pass since those years ago.
Who knew that paintings could be that powerful?
Loved ones have gone to bone, and being is too much.
That liquid woman appeared, in a distance of poems.

passage (for Renée Pennington)

2012-01-27T10:12:00.000-08:00

The outside is much too large
for a Mysterium to encompass.
The inside is way too deep
for plunging down to fibers.

Something in-between must suffice.

A little whirlwind gathering into itself
waves of rising melody and becoming
a thing of dark-colored moments.

That will do!

Even he was circumscribed
by time and a cage of fine bones.
Even so, Scriabin made abysses
large enough for hues of dreaming,
deep enough to plunge and rise,
stable enough for a brief transit
to the aural house of old Eros.

I've been thinking about...

2012-01-09T16:46:00.000-08:00

...a dream three nights ago.

I was in a place of rooms. Many odd people were coming and going. The milieu was charged with a semi-intellectual or pseudo-artistic resonance. A woman, unusually attired (like a Bulgarian celebrant?), was hithering and thithering in the background, coming in and going out of view. She seemed to be dependent on my intrinsic je ne sais quo to support the structure of her being. Or to rescue her from some fate that was being vaugely spun off-camera, so to speak. Her eyes, during sporadic glances, moved across the outlines of my own nocturnal being. But only glancing from the vaguest background.

Then...

some rather dramatic black-haired guy kept coming up to me. He projected the persona of a half-concierge, half-master of ceremony. And he kept speaking a phrase to me in French. Something about them all awaiting my performance of "la musique sur un thème spirituel."

I eventually woke up.

So I've been thinking about that dream. Aspects of it are obviously narcissistic. I mean...a gathering of souls around and for me! Jeez, how uncomfortable. And how impossible it would have been to extract myself, other than by waking up. But I'm more struck by the pervading atmosphere of the thing: it was like some half-lit purgatory, with much unkown significance afoot.

Well...dreams are neat and weird.

An appropriate soundtrack:

some nice Chekhov passages

2011-12-08T09:31:00.001-08:00

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

2011-12-04T06:32:00.000-08:00

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!

2011-12-03T09:20:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-30T06:07:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-23T06:52:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-21T05:46:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-20T12:07:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-20T09:54:00.000-08:00

About Weinberg

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

2011-11-16T10:01:00.000-08:00

Sibelius: The Rest is Noise

Listen: fragments of the 8th

Tranströmer -- subtle visionary

2011-11-14T06:27:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-13T10:19:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

I really like this lovely movement by Sibelius:

Reading Nabokov

2011-11-06T15:23:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-05T12:41:00.000-07:00

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"

2011-10-20T05:09:00.000-07:00

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"

dusk along the Rhine

2011-10-18T10:55:00.000-07:00

Picture, if you will, an overcast sky, toward twilight. And a diffuse mist, barely visible, along the margins of the wide Rhine as it slowly curves in a dark, mythic dreaming.

The Rhine has flowed here a very long time, yet now it seems caught up in moments of suspense, a kind of stasis. Moving and not moving. Pines and hardwoods, black upon the shadowed slopes, gather toward the river banks. As if coming to deposit sighs and secrets into the darkening waters.

There is something daemonic -- a godly silence -- here beneath the surface of mere phenomena. We see the river and the forest, and we sense more than the river and the forest. Ages of untold happening are pensive on the slopes, are rapt in the fathomless currents.

poetry is important stuff

2011-10-16T06:41:00.000-07:00

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...

2011-10-11T04:59:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-11T04:57:00.000-07:00

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.

My latest poem collection

2011-10-09T15:53:00.001-07:00

In Lieu of Opium at Issuu

ballade

2011-09-06T15:50:00.000-07:00

"The sense of the world must lie outside the world." -- Tractatus, by the mystic Ludwig Wittgenstein

Yellow days burn down to twilight ashes.
The sun is wearing out, autumn coming.
I stir evening ashes into thoughtlessness
and drink up the bitter liquid memory
of that lost day when I never met you.

Tomorrow the colors of flowers will pale.
The air will lean over, telling itself riddles.

Somewhere a child is playing a toy piano
that was imported from Bonn or Vienna.
Tiny skittering fingers are playing absurdly,
playing an innocent dance for a future friend.
She grows up through my imagining heart
to become an autumn rose that only deepens.
She will wait for me inside recurring dreams
that take me toward a dewfall under eyelids.
There we will blink at one another like twins
separated by happenstance and awful magic.

Where will I go outside of dreams to wait for our first meeting?

There is no place. But the sense of it is persisting.
I suppose a gentle madness comes to a music lover.
Eventually the shapes of tones take on a geography.

Flowers are fading because the world is real.

Or is it?

Perhaps the meaning of two children laughing lies outside the world.

the question

2011-09-04T18:30:00.001-07:00

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.

hoarfrost and horizon

2011-09-01T17:21:00.000-07:00

Miss Benton, if you could hear me
you'd know I just can't concentrate
on morning's multiplication tables.
It's 9 AM, and I can't think of that.
It happened to me two hours ago.
I was waiting at the hillside bus stop,
and October became unknown to me.

I'm sure I will remember it for a very long time....

A spell of vapor hangs across the neighborhood.
From houses to yards to bushes and the pinewoods,
a cold frost is here, covering things with meaning.
From this hillside, it seems I can see for miles,
and there is something unusual on the horizon.

This great frost is like the fallen breath
of a Spirit telling me for the first time
that Mother and Daddy will die someday,
that I will not last forever. I now know
a new thing and it almost frightens me.

But there is also a beautiful peace
on this early frost like old dreaming.

The other kids don't see what has come over me.
They are being kids and they are laughing in time.
They don't notice something has happened to me.

I am too young to hold the secret of this frost
stretching beyond the world, and beckoning.

Sonja of the golden rooms

2011-08-31T06:36:00.001-07:00

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

2011-08-31T06:34:00.000-07:00

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)

2011-08-31T06:28:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-30T06:45:00.000-07:00

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.

of reeds and surfaces

2011-08-22T08:25:00.000-07:00

(Trio for Oboe, Harp & Conga)

Off in morning distance above the brackish marsh,
shreds of gray rainfall will soon lose faith in falling.
To stand among cattails is an act of going nowhere.
Coming to this place is to forget the fires of winter.

A desolate bird, unseen and dark-toned
haunts the air in a melisma on "time."

No dwelling or industry scales the horizon.
On that vague line love sleeps in suspense,
stretched in thin dreams of laughter unheard.

But here amid the blown reeds it does not matter at all.
The surfaces of rough ground, shallows, and textured sky
(a thousand ghosts of dead nostalgias in the muted clouds)
hold fascination enough, hold a world of rapt decaying.

An ecstasy of despond is now in that strange bird's lied.
The empty spread of vista and the strangled soughing air
wound with the gracious swing of an entropic god's scythe.

To stand loosely on the space of this day's turning,
holding lightly a cane of balance, thinking of nothing...
with reeds and surfaces becoming somber umber keys
of cryptic music, an orchestra keening on a blended ostinato --

what dire pleasure to simply whistle into the wind and crippled rain!

letter to Nabina Das

2011-08-22T08:24:00.001-07:00

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)

2011-08-20T19:50:00.001-07:00

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.

SCATTERED LIGHT

the well-tempered translator (for Yael)

2011-08-20T19:49:00.000-07:00

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...

2011-08-20T19:48:00.001-07:00

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)

2011-08-20T19:46:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Burckhardt abroad

2011-08-06T06:39:00.000-07:00

Florence, Italy

How exquisite the fall and cast of sunlight in late morning!

That glow on these hills is living
also in the quiet gleams of this wine.
Woodsmoke drifts from somewhere.
Warbling thrushes unseen in chestnuts
or from thickets bordering the spring.

Vineyards ripen and orchards of olive trees are still in the haze.

The bottle nearly empty beside me
on a table holding shadows in cypress,
here on a Tuscan terrace some golden miles
from the city, here where the wild is sloping.

Are my lids falling down into a revery
or am I seeing ghosts in the landscape?

Far down there, a Roman bridge of stone
and dark poplars standing – silent centurions.
Young women laughing, clothed so strangely --
broad-sleeved garments of moss color and lavender.
As they stroll languidly one's lips are reciting verses.
Poems of subtle satire or ribald country romance?

Emerging from trees men pass them mid-bridge,
rougher appareled – wanderers from Abruzzi?
The lively girls curtsey and the youths are abashed,
heads bowed in shame at meeting such wonders.

These must be legends of air and strong wine,
for they quiver and lose their solid resolution.
Leaving now the bridge of arches they disappear
into seams of grottoes and the lattices of trees.

Wide this city seen from surrounding hills,
as if a basin of forms dreamed up from earth!
Now walking the Via de Corso, I seek knowledge
between architecture of cathedrals and commerce.

Again this Italian light!...
glancing from wall to wall,
as if a series of mirrors reflecting.
Until I am almost lost or hallucinating
a new world that is also deeper in time.

Angles and planes hold memorial penumbrae implicitly.

The afternoon is warm and the people are moving.
Serious monks, gentlemen, and dark-browed donne.
But the texture of buildings is what I am hearing.
Sacred shapes murmur their myths of provenance.
And rumors of genius hang on symbolic façades.

I listen until I am lost in allegories of rebirth
that play upon this stage for an audience of one.

The citizens of Florence are dissolving!
A feint of this light or a symptom of mind?
Other folk come, at home on cobblestones --
in rhythms of gesture and alien demeanor.

Yes, I must be sun-stricken and feverish...
the antique finery of their genteel couture...
eyelashes fluttering, coy smiles, and rouge...
the gallant ones moving with a roguish stride...

I gaze into strange eyes and see the birth of irony.
An awareness of self burst from chains of convention.

They speak!...the undertones of consciousness are unjaded and revelatory!

My footsteps echo in the Uffizi Gallery,
the grand rooms in awe of their wonders.

Botticelli's Birth of Venus – audacity of beauty!
And no longer heavy pigments of a sunken age.
The movement of fabrics and the moving of beings –
an unlocking of forces pushing blood through living.

In all of these chambers of the masters,
a paradox of sensations is perplexing me.
Rhythms of form and dynamical expressions
and hues of brilliance and blooming of planes...
they all share dimension with uncanny depth,
a womb-like quiet of soul mirroring soul.

I leave this magnificence
and enter again the street.
Now the conjured free folk
have gone back to centuries.
And I move among my own –
contemporaries of a duller day.

How brief that spark of opening
to world as spellbound inspiration!
How fallen into a moribund trudging
our present pulsing and eyes of coin!

As I move among these contemporaries,
a haunting absence lies between the figures.
From paintings of new-dawning psychologies,
I retrieve certain things that are missing now.
Life for life's sake and damn all the Devils!

An urbane gentility and graceful wit
and a noble bow to things of the mind.
A glancing into ideals of old Greek visions
and a fascination with the enigma of Woman.

As I walk onto the Ponte Vecchio,
the evening ripples on into night.
Boatmen ply the quiet River Arno.
A vagrant call is answered with ennui.
Soon lights are lit along the shore banks.
I stand listlessly, and a low fog is forming.

Surely there was no scheduled celebration!
The river must now be giving up its spirits!

Unnaturally come strange barges aglow,
emerging within this false moonless spell –
a festival of floats, a naval Carnivale!

This file of blossom-decked boats
holds all manner of posing creatures –
silver masques and plumed wide hats
and laughter on the torch-lit water.

A procession of colorful tableaux.
A series of aquatic phantasmagoria.
Allegories acted out in pantomimes
and all manner of histories confused!

A great argument has sprung on the air –
Herod is losing his will to lovely Salomé,
who stands with her hands on hips
amid a pooling of seven pastel silks.

Another barque is filled with musicians --
lutes, drums, and flutes are delirious
with modal tunes, as a Fool sings forth.

Another is garlanded and eerie with gods.
Genii comport with damsels and nymphs!
Incense flutters from hieroglyph banners
that catch a sudden-rising nocturnal wind.

Another conveys a tower of scaffolds --
an uncanny Machine of new philosophy.
Its gears and other workings not visible,
and braced atop is a sphere of glass plates.
It turns gyroscopically as a Franciscan inside
is drunken and pleased by the phases of Saturn!

Astrologers mingle significantly with vagabonds.
Jealousy argues with Irony while Fate sits brooding.
Fear is hounded by Hope, Spectacle slays Tragedy.
Midgets dance as Bacchus stomps Misery into juices.
A masquerade of comedians goose a great Caesar.

Finally the last boat and somber it sails.
Black of hull and moaning its passengers.
Ostensible ambulance of the plague-doomed,
and Death at the stern cracking jokes aplenty.

Silence settles over the now-calm river.
The fog has misted off to a returned moon.
Those creatures of night drift away into mind.
I go with perhaps wisdom, phantom-gleaned.

* * *

Away homeward with my satchel of impressions.
This carriage is rocking, my thoughts are dubious.

The countryside also jostles, with luminous shadows.
Oaks and hedge and the summer grasses emblematic
of mysterious mood – a dappling of being onto forms,
somehow yearning, forthing, an energy unceasing.

Every object seems now suffused
with message and gleam of meaning.
I attend them with a new way of sensing –
with a new science of temporal space!

But I am also shaken...

My well-thumbed Schopenhauer always with me,
the effect of it appalling with coloration of truth.

Yet...

Is it perhaps a better madness to plunge
from dark abyss into affirmational abyss?

There!...amid thick tangles of light and brambles –
a numinous wink from transient, renascent shapes.

He said time is a form of being inside my head.
Then I have indeed laughed on a Stygian boat!

Jacob Burckhardt (1818 -- 1897)

Burckhardt was an art and cultural historian, with an original approach: instead of focusing on political and military historiography, he delved into the social fabric of an era. His most famous work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

"This meant arriving -- through an interaction with materials, since this is the only way in which any knowledge of the past can be arrived at -- at an understanding of how things looked and felt to the people of the time: the possibilities of a situation, the mood of an assembly, the flavour of a place, and in aggregate a view of the world, a whole vision of life....Because of the indispensibility of intuition, imagination, empathy and psychological insight to the historian, plus the ability to make artistic use of given materials, Burckhardt insisted that his task could not be systematized into any so-called 'philosophy of history.'" -- Bryan Magee

This poem is an imagining of how Burckhardt might have imagined.

The Lake (a ghost story)

2011-08-01T16:51:00.000-07:00

My friend Annie Biondi Stevenson took my song "The Lake" and came up with images to go with it. She made a slide-show video. How nice of her to do that! And what a cool thing she made. Thanks, Annie!

Here's the YouTube

The Lake

I float in my boat about one hundred yards from the shore.
I drift on the lake, drinkin' ten beers or more.
Summer sun cooks me up a serving of dreams,
and I drowse like that lazy faun by Claude Debussy.

Daydreams get stirred up with a relish of recall,
and I think about that time before the dam was installed.
All the homesteads were abandoned, the coffins disinterred.
Rites were performed so no curses would stir

stir the big water,
stir the big water,
stir the big water of Greer's Ferry Lake.

But sometimes the schemes of sincere mere men
get waylaid by unforeseen consequence.
I do believe that all of those cautions did fail.
I've seen things in the depths make a sober man quail.

Some of us folk got minds that are slightly free.
We don't mock our spirits, we don't chop down willow trees.
So what of those apparitions reported back then?
Has a liquid mausoleum sealed obsessions in

beneath big water,
beneath big water,
beneath the big water of Greer's Ferry Lake?

Sometimes when I peer down in the watery vast,
I see her mad spirit amid the crappie and the bass.
Not a-swimmin', she's a-swirlin', she's a-searchin' for God.
Gonna confront him for killin' her with diphtheria's blood rot.

Well, I ain't like those who have lost their inner eye.
My peripheral sight sees through what shadows glide.
Once as a boy jumpin' headstones, a spectre gave a fright.
Momma said that was a goat with long hair silken white.

So I am primed to see what lies beyond the pale.
Yes, I have a hoard of uncanny tales I could tell.
And I'll float upon this reservoir from end to blue end
until I can speak solace to my little restless friend.

Sometimes when I peer down in the watery vast,
I see her mad spirit amid the crappie and the bass.
Not a-swimmin', she's a-swirlin', she's a-searchin' for God.
Gonna confront him for killin' her with diphtheria's blood rot.

The waves of this lake lap incessantly.
Once into a lonesome cove at dusk I did drift.
The water transmogrified to mist eerily,
in the shape of a child, up through the pines she did lift.

"A Seasonal Affair"

2011-07-30T09:07:00.000-07:00

Below is the link to a poem by Karla Bush (The Black Crow Writer). I think it is lovely and haunting...crafted with a natural flair:

A Seasonal Affair

Mozart and the Ineffable Priming

2011-07-28T08:11:00.000-07:00

How silly to use the word “ineffable” and then to go a-yammering with words.

Anyway...here's what happened.

In 1980 (or thereabouts), I began to be “bothered” by classical music. Something was there in that stuff. It whispered seductions to me, but I was too rough and dull-brained to decipher the murmuring. I was also too stubborn to let it go. Something was there, and by god, I would keep listening, keep trying to hear...to understand, to become one with it.

(It would take another dozen years or so before that night, when Beethoven escorted me into a complete affective grasping of what great music is and what it communicates.)

Hard day at work. Then driving home. Car radio on the NPR station. To that regular afternoon program of classical music. Another Mozart piano sonata! And played again by Robert Casadesus, that light-fingered Frenchman.

It was all about the cascade. The pianist offered up the score with a delicate touch and tone. With verve -- ripples of notes, almost hypnotizing me as I drove through the Little Rock traffic. An inexpressible mood would wrap around me. I was getting close to real music but was still at arm's length from its deeper significance. I had not crossed over.

This ignorance is hard to describe. An attraction was there, but I didn't understand what I was hearing and experiencing. Those of profounder sensibility would say, “You're not supposed to understand.” But after my later Beethoven epiphany, I think they would be wrong. Later, I did understand, though that word is problematic. It's more like this: later, the music bonded with fibers in me that before had been merely burgeoning threads of significance.

The intervening years passed, and a few other pieces goosed the carbeurator of my curiosity, of my accruing response: Schumann's Symphony No. 1, Schubert's Symphony No. 8, Debussy's La Mer, Chopin's Preludes.

Mozart primed me with his liquid, dancing piano sonatas. And later, with Beethoven, my musical soul began firing on all cylinders.

We are serious!

2011-07-26T14:06:00.001-07:00

You don't have to giggle a gaggle of words.
But almost-smiles do happen in the turning world.

Where is it frickin' written
that even blithe or blissy souls
must head for hell and black abysses
when sitting down to write a poem?

Egads!...I have no free will!
I was sipping wine pleasantly --
a bouquet of tremulous flowers
and vague indifferent visions
just hanging there in my head...
pushed me somehow into a poem.
And light instantly began a-moaning!

So serious. So serious. So serious.

Where is it frickin' written
that words must wear robes
like muttering morbid monks
with broken hearts or heads
filled with profound darkness?

Now of course one can go too far
and write a happy thing of horror --
no one wants to read vapid gushing,
a folksy wink makes a body shudder,
and a grinning poem is way grotesque.

But at least one poem in a thousand
might eschew a suicidal wallowing,
might almost smile at simple hours,
might give the fitful muse a night off,
might move in lines without a whimper.

God!......

At least one poem in a thousand
could be a Zen-like observation
of how luminosity touches objects
with its own moods and compulsion.

Damn...poetry is so miserably serious!
I think I'll jump and chort and snortle.

The Lake (a ghost-story song)

2011-07-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

Words and music copyright -- Tim Buck
All parts -- also me

The Lake

I float in my boat about one hundred yards from the shore.
I drift on the lake, drinkin' ten beers or more.
Summer sun cooks me up a serving of dreams,
and I drowse like that lazy faun by Claude Debussy.

Daydreams get stirred up with a relish of recall,
and I think about that time before the dam was installed.
All the homesteads were abandoned, the coffins disinterred.
Rites were performed so no curses would stir

stir the big water,
stir the big water,
stir the big water of Greer's Ferry Lake.

But sometimes the schemes of sincere mere men
get waylaid by unforeseen consequence.
I do believe that all of those cautions did fail.
I've seen things in the depths make a sober man quail.

Some of us folk got minds that are slightly free.
We don't mock our spirits, we don't chop down willow trees.
So what of those apparitions reported back then?
Has a liquid mausoleum sealed obsessions in

beneath big water,
beneath big water,
beneath the big water of Greer's Ferry Lake?

Sometimes when I peer down in the watery vast,
I see her mad spirit amid the crappie and the bass.
Not a-swimmin', she's a-swirlin', she's a-searchin' for God.
Gonna confront him for killin' her with diphtheria's blood rot.

Well, I ain't like those who have lost their inner eye.
My peripheral sight sees through what shadows glide.
Once as a boy jumpin' headstones, a spectre gave a fright.
Momma said that was a goat with long hair silken white.

So I am primed to see what lies beyond the pale.
Yes, I have a hoard of uncanny tales I could tell.
And I'll float upon this reservoir from end to blue end
until I can speak solace to my little restless friend.

Sometimes when I peer down in the watery vast,
I see her mad spirit amid the crappie and the bass.
Not a-swimmin', she's a-swirlin', she's a-searchin' for God.
Gonna confront him for killin' her with diphtheria's blood rot.

The waves of this lake lap incessantly.
Once into a lonesome cove at dusk I did drift.
The water transmogrified to mist eerily,
in the shape of a child, up through the pines she did lift.

Greer's Ferry Lake is in north-central Arkansas

strings

2011-07-22T09:23:00.001-07:00

When a cello plays
I think of you so fondly ~
moisture on my cheeks.

it keeps happening

2011-07-17T13:55:00.002-07:00

In the middle of morning
during the quiet summers,
it keeps happening --

that spell of weary light dappling green or dried grass.

This is not religious. This is not artistic.
It is beyond dogma or technique.

What is it?

Who could say?

The light of mid-morning falls deeper than optics,
almost funereal and though soundless laments.

It happens that such moments come
to shock thought into a new current --

it keeps happening and the caught eye
will not be torn away from this vision.

No...it is not like death. That is facile.
It is something else, shyly pausing...

The light on this morning grass is the ghost of time.

bewildering

2011-07-17T13:55:00.001-07:00

Every town grows slowly from the strange,
from a seed of harsh cells and owling nights.
In south Arkansas a town was peddler born --
a little trading post amid pines and Quapaws.
Sweating days and untongued bargaining
coiled into early years, into eyes like flint.

Every town has many years of frost and rain.
The congealing of a populace seems algorithmic.

How bewildering and good when wild visions come!
When they graze the surface of a coming town.
When a renegade imagination glances sideways
to dwell on faces long dead and stern women!

Urgent sex must have found convenient moments
to bring balm for lives poised on the fringe of fevers.
Brutal hours of labor -- felling trees and giving birth.
A town also born and human beings becoming neighbors.
Until the complex rhythms of gestures and superstitions
and weathers and deaths and dancing led to community.

Decades roll through fist fights, gambling, and a war.
Until oil is struck and the sky trembles over new people.
A square surrounds the merciless court house of judges.
Banks and shops rise on progress like opium-walled mirages.
And dark greenbacks of 1925 are magical with engraving.
The smells inside buildings are so fragrant with commerce.

Human beings move surely in hats and fashionable certanties
of what a day means and of what an unseen god expects.

A mile and time away a refinery blasts fumes and nightmares
for the boy who has seen it there and whose belly is filled by it.
Wraiths come at night from derrick woods tocking and conspiring,
making the days dubious and all the rooted people seem too solid.

And when the boy has become a twisting mass of years,
he almost smiles because he will never escape the strange.

ole factory

2011-07-14T05:24:00.000-07:00

Every night, the similar dull story:
dreaming down into vast buildings,
where experts of curious laws and logic
work amid configurations of substance
and glistening machines of entropy.
Every night, into the dense foundries
of malleable significance and rumors
that stream from sarcastic eyes removing
all knowledge and skill from my labors.

Then the day comes because the sun is surreal.
And the same day lurches through stricken hours.

Against the gods of time and predicament,
I pour red wine into this afternoon glass.
A pause to linger over the pungency,
and then I drink what tastes like lips.
And from that tasting comes aromas
gliding like silks dipped in frankincense.
Or from distant earthy villages heavy
with unknown smells from golden skin,
smells dusky and rich and deeply feminine.

I have breathed you in on a gasping desire,
imagined you on tilted planes of smiling lips
that blast the eyes of all my nights' accusers.

René Daumal

2011-07-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

René Daumal lived from 1908 to 1944. He was a poet, editor, and allegorist during the French Surrealist ferment.

I've read his Mount Analogue and A Night of Serious Drinking. I have the biography by Kathleen Rosenblatt. Daumal was an interesting fellow. And like several others back then with an unusual shape of consciousness, he was drawn to the enigmatic Gurdjieff.

Daumal's story "The Great Magician" was made into a short film. It is available from the links below to Youtube. For me, there is something in this little story that resonates.

Okay. Now I want to digress a bit.

The real Surrealism (in Daumal's case, para- or pata- surrealism) had overtones of darkness and undertones of profundity ringing deeper than what latter-day American mystigogues have given us. I won't name any names, lest the shock offend sensitive admirers and devotees. Back then, the plunge into unconscious energies occasionally brushed up against the mystical, the harsh abyss. Now, we get a cheaper, diluted form -- self-pleased avatars produce effects for effects sake. Or ostensibly uproot the "cool" fibers of American pathology, as if that should be of interest to anyone. Their filmic (or whatever) effusions strike me as bathetic expressions concerned with a banal culture.

Real Surrealism went far beyond such trite cultural commentary. It was not interested in an oh-so ironic inventory, uprooting, and display of a self-important culture's sublimations. Now, we are given America as the exemplary enigma, the generative abyss. My word, what nonsense. Back in France during the '20s and '30s, truly bent minds were concerned instead with the dire-objective. Real soul-stuff.

Surrealism is authentic when concerned with the enigma of World, rather than with theatrics of neurosis.

The Great Magician (Part 1)

The Great Magician (Part 2)

Afterthought: This stuff in general makes me think about Surrealistic painting. What I see painted nowadays in that vein strikes me as 1) straining after effect; 2) displaying shallow sensibility. And even the old stuff -- the more I consider it, the more banal it seems to me. The masters like Dali, De Chirico, Miro, Magritte, and such...again, a straining after effect, though not nearly as off-putting as Contemporary Surrealism. The only old guy whose paintings seem to be genuine expressions of very deep sensibility is Yves Tanguy. A convincing subtlety breathes in his works.

luck

2011-07-06T15:34:00.000-07:00

It is evening in our village.
Tomorrow is the Dragon Parade.
Tonight we light low candles
and open the Book of the Dead,
speaking beatitudes to ancestors.

What colors will shatter the noontime!
And movements beyond any dancing!

Tomorrow a festival for everyone.
Many faces will smile superstitiously,
as if dragon segments have powers
to fashion from heaven new blessings.

There is no reason to regret old mornings,
when begonias brought sighs to the season.
Time comes and goes just like breathing.
Green rice can't drink memory's vapor.

A soothsayer lives here in our rice village.
She casts finger bones of her antecedent.
She looks into the arrangements of fortune.
Some people pay her for luck's dark secrets.

I keep clear of her and good luck.
I prepare my clothes for celebration.
Tomorrow's dragon will swallow destiny.
So many misunderstand the symbol!

The dragon swirls this way and that
to a rhythm emblematic and subtle,

pouring from the Tao of what happens.

Once....

2011-07-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

....upon a time, there was an anvil. It just sat there in the blacksmith shop all day, getting pounded on. It had chronic headaches. At night, it would try to weep, but it could produce no tears. "Woe is me! All I do is just get pounded on. What kind of life is this?"

And then one special night -- at the stroke of 12:16 -- a drunken, flouncing fairy stumbled into the shop. She was holding not a magic wand but a sword. She waved it around over her head rather incautiously. And then said to the anvil:

"Buck up, my dear. Things could be worse. You could have come into the world as a ship anchor. Always getting thrown overboard. That would suck. You would always get wet and always rust. But here, things are cozy, and you get to perform a valuable service to keep the world in balance."

The anvil would have scratched its head and said something, but it was an anvil.

So the hiccupping fairy kept on speechifying:

"See? This sword was wrought right here, years ago, right on top of your head. And then it went into battle. It was such a strong sword that it broke all the enemy swords. The knight who wielded it was a rebel, a champion of the peasants. They won the war, and the kingdom became all nice and stuff. Everybody was happy...except the former Lord, who got flung into the next province from a trebuchet."

The anvil started feeling a little better about itself. About its role in societal reordering and proletarian ecstasy.

So the fairy knighted the anvil with a tap of the sword. Instantly, the anvil became as light as a feather and began to levitate. Then it floated out of the blacksmith shop and onward...up, up over trees and under the moon. Soon, it realized its headache was gone. The magical flight had done wonders. But the anvil also realized the iron-y of the situation: a flying anvil is bad for uprisings.

It flew back into the shop, clunked down on its pedestal, and lived happily ever after.

manifesto

2011-07-01T19:43:00.000-07:00

Love songs have been sung to death.
No more! For pity's sake, no more.
Love poems have gushed too much.
Deliver me from Neruda's stinking juices!

It's high time to catch God in a snare.
When he squeals we'll have our quarry.
A sky of stars is dumb and too much.
Why sing onto a canvas without context?

The plot is staggering. All are drunken.
It's high time to shoot a sparkle rocket
into Heaven and explode all the angels.
A shower of indignant, dumbfounded angels!
We'll gather them up for a hard interrogation.
However they answer, we'll have a verdict:
to sing and sigh and weep and gush?...
or to stand stoically in a pool of juices?

Love poems have gushed entirely too much
around the sealed lips of the world's presence.

Ha!...because I ache I turn to metaphysics.
I'll twist an angel's arm until I hear it squeal,
"It is written: one day you shall be met."

Oh, hell...there's nothing to be done for it --

Her eyes kindle the East of mornings.
Her silence holds the Source of rivers.
I've never heard her natural laughter.
But I know it would sparkle darkly
and cushion all of my fallen years.

on the ditch bank

2011-06-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

Nothing much to speak of
happens on Maple Slough ditch,
where cotton fields shove up
against the brush and uncertain
trees -- no maples are visible.

Probably in 1938 some farmer,
who didn't realize he was a poet,
christened this field run-off ditch.
He knew there were no maple trees,
but he had a necessary visioning
of New England mornings in autumn,
with fog in colorful boughs and trout
dimpling the surface for fallen nymphs.

So...out here, we have Maple Slough ditch.

When heavy rains come, a little river flows.
And one can stand here on the steep bank,
imagining he is somewhere else as if floating
on buoyant light and the vague sentiments
of impotent nostalgia...or as if a far friend
were standing beside him in the gleams.
There is so much to speak softly about
on the edge of time where poems grow.

People somehow end up on the ditch bank.

Years ago a hysterical young blond woman
pounded on the door before the sun was up.
I followed her dutifully down the flat forty acres
to that falling-down little house. Her husband
was lying unconscious in the filth. He "forgot"
to take the heart pills. I grabbed his black hair,
as curly as the mane of a golden-eyed goat.
I shouted until he came back to life, moaning.
Back at my window I stared into graying dark
and listened for cries of ancient sacrificial goats
waiting dumbly for the edging nearness of a god.

Later on, the husband managed to kill himself.
The young blond woman eventually disappeared.
That decrepit little moaning house is now gone,
knocked down for cotton. The soil is indifferent.

And I remember a river flowing with shadows.
Mallards swimming between the cypress roots.
A black goat with rectangular eyes complained
amid the poetry I felt on that sloping grass.

Nothing much to speak of
happens on Maple Slough ditch.

So sometimes it becomes necessary
to write poems and send them reeling
into the hot air that blows over cotton.

stricken

2011-06-15T20:15:00.001-07:00

The stricken birds sing of mortal time.
They are singing very serious songs.
If they could simply sing without stress,
the songs would have no beautiful drama.

I "sing" so obsessively because of you.
And time rushes toward the pale horizon.
And your beauty is on me like fever colors.
Your spirit haunts me like a sigh of death.