nocturne

Chimes tinkle from the Orient --
pling -- plitter -- glinkle -- dihm.
Glissandos drift on breathing wind,
a sound that carries far on night.

No, that is only being imagined.

Other tones come as phantasms.
Murmurrings bring much meaning.
Sometimes one just has to plant
aural seeds in gourds of silence.

Real words from pensive corners
would sound more like a scolding --
the way furniture solidly mocks
pathetic tangos of one's fancy,
the way a shrugging mirror laughs
when passing by it lost in thought.

Wind is stirring up old stars,
thrumming unseen power lines.
Light bulbs dim and shadows play.
Familiar solids fade to melting.
In that masked hesitating time,
a mummer is in the vestibule
and offers up mute vocalises.

A phantasm's consonantal code
might leak from a gentle tongue.
And silence steps aside to hear
a voice cooing imaginary smiles.

Chimes are playing in my Orient --
ching -- chinkle -- chitter -- chimple.

The night has sent a distant fairy,
spreading glitter on pale moments.


Copyright 2011 -- Tim Buck

poise (for William Crawford)

Always the lake of language
is roiled by some idiot winds.
All I can do is sit on a boulder
and wait for coursing phrases
to blow flopping onto my head.
Yes, I wait and sometimes whistle
dissonant tunes to blank me out.
If I'm stupefied enough, you see,
a thing with magic scales a-flashing
comes because the water gives it.
Though coming a bit goggle-eyed.

Will Crawford is a different angler,
his rod and reel work with poise.
Line unspools to trace his targets,
coaxing up those trophy images,
perfect visions for our reading.
This is not skill or strictly talent.
Something else is working here.
I think he is in secret league
with an unseen nymph below,
daughter of some liquid god,
she brings a phrase for hooking,
rewarding an unstupefied mind.
Language trout brilliant gleaming.

I don't understand how he does it.
He flicks his wrist like a magician,
and no image seems accidental.

time to deal with it

Robert Schumann, 1810 - 1856

Robert Schumann's Kreisleriana.

I love so much of Schumann's music. The only things that give me pause are his violin concerto, his piano sonatas (a bit formless...hard to grasp ahold), and his Kreisleriana.

I have the Murray Perahia CD of Kreisleriana. It is based on E.T.A. Hoffmann's stories from his book Phantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Pieces in the Style of Callot), published in 1814. I like Hoffmann. But whenever I listen to that CD, my mind soon begins wandering. This will not do. This must change. I must figure out what the hell is wrong with me and set it to rights. It makes no sense that a Hoffmannesque Schumann piece would cause my head to float off in a state of drowsy incomprehension.

Okay. I'm putting the CD in now. I'm going to listen again. I'm going to subdue this sucker. Make it a part of my soul's texture. The way his symphonies, piano concerto, cello concerto, his Carnaval are such a part of me.


* * *


Now. All right. I listened to it. Hmm. Give me a few moments to collect my thoughts......................................

Okay. This time, I read the "program" in the booklet before listening. I tried to pay good attention to the Hoffmann references revealed in the notes. I wanted the background stuff to be given its due respect and regard.

But as I listened, a new way of listening opened up to me. The Hoffmann story references -- which had caused me trouble in earlier sessions -- began to fade from prominence. It came to me that this composition is less about Hoffmann and his Kreisler creation and more about Schumann himself. This is music from a soul who is very sensitive to musical beauties and its transformative power...to how it can complement so well the way things feel and the way things change. Both flight and abyss...transience and equivocal stasis. It's about coming in and out of light, in and out of darkness. This is music about Schumann and music about music.

Yes, Kreisler the Kappelmeister is also obsessed with and swept away by music. But his eight psychological "adventures" are mere springboards for a Schumannesque adventure. Much less, I think now, about being grist for musical illustration. This piece, in its unfolding and as a whole, is also about how strange it felt to live inside the Romantic era and milieu. It's about how forms of feeling moved in new shapes and onto shadowed surfaces of imagination and emotion, both of which shaded off toward infinite horizons. Schumann merely "breathed in" the spirit of Kreisler as a primer to stimulate his own, similar spirit. At the keyboard, Schumann exhaled this mutuality of complex consciousness: variously mecurial and melancholy.

So...instead of me trying to listen to and process this work as an aural description, I now experience it as a definite overlay of Schumann onto the vague spiritual shenanigans of Kreisler. That fictional Kappelmeister is not an analog to the music; rather, he represents a formal contour around which Schumann traces his own aesthetic, dreamlike trajectory.

Yet true to Hoffmann, there are moments when an opening onto eeriness occurs. The eeriness of a macabre story element maybe or the eeirness of living per se, which sometimes moves across the octaves of each of our souls.


* * *

Perahia's playing on the CD is dynamic, beautiful, perfect.

And here's Mikhail Pletnev performing selections:
Kreisleriana 7 & 8

a question of character

I have fallen into an unknown novel,
into a terra cotta town of pastel light
and tall trees here and there, fronded.
Mint-green buses run from the fifties.

The role is on and so I play it!

To whom shall I unburden my sadness?
Fatima of the Dark Eyes lives close by.

Will she frown or smile if I knock
on the wrought-iron filigreed door?
Something tells me I must glibly shrug
and act as if things are almost natural.

Fatima sighs and her lips are smiling.
She brings me an ivory mug of beer,
shaped like a squat elephant praying,
its hinged lid opens as if in surgery!

Who is writing this damn thing, anyway?
I suppose I must keep on ad-libbing...

Oh no! On this terrace of begonias,
Fatima's deep eyes are now drifting,
as I go nervously into confessions.
I'm under compulsion to burden her,
between drags on our cigarettes.
I must tell about the indignant ghost
I've trapped inside my foolish soul.

Fatima excuses herself with politeness,
and with sardonic wink she glides away.
She goes now somewhere for dancing --
a vague dance to wine-dark mandolins.
Her going splashes me with evidence.
Strong clues about where this is going.

Yes!...this novel is about the impossible.
A story of words that can't be spoken.
About the shape of great foolishness,
how the stolen diamond of my blue love
is so blemished with my character flaw.


Copyright 2011 -- Tim Buck

note to a friend

Where you stand the trees appear
to have been thinking of philosophy.
Winter trees now almost trembling
on the verge of a new conception.
Collegiate elms branch like nerves
touched by your foreign smile.

Where you stand the snow appears
to be waking up from mumbled dreams.
That snow has fallen deep around you,
and now awake it whispers astonishment.

Look how these natural forms have gained significance!
Even the wise stones of architecture have become naive.
Oh...your presence standing there has brought a mood
to the old atmosphere of scholars -- a new kind of genius!
Old lands trickle culture and beauty through your eyes.
Passersby wonder why they suddenly feel different.

Substances are gaining intensity,
and a moment of time is turning
into what it really wants to be.

This photograph almost brings you to me.
I could shake your hand and say "Hello!"
But then I would suffer the aftershocks
of encounter with a vital living poem.

I am really struggling for words here.
All I want to do is capture something
about the way you change the space,
where tree and snow and stone become
somehow stunned to have you standing.

It's very unusual how you affect the atmosphere.
The very atoms of space around you are tingling.

You are so young, my friend. So much life
waits and so many scenes becoming poems --
stanzas of time to hold your faery presence.

Only a sonnet unwritten by Shakespeare
could express how you enhance this world.


Copyright 2011 -- Tim Buck

Matt's review of my novel on Amazon.com

Matt Dioguardi reviewed my novel Séance in B Minor. I am honored and grateful. Here's the link to the Amazon.com page, where it appears:


Review of Séance in B Minor

two Germans (a meditation on Kant and Herzog)

How did you feel in Königsberg?
Did the morning Baltic fog hang
then drift its tales of open journey,
its wet echoing flap of sails' mystery?
Did visions disturb your serious steps
toward wooden space for thinking?

And if the early sun broke through,
before you reached swallowing doors,
did the light ruffle your catergories
of routine digestion, starched linen?
Did that gleaming shaft halt your steps
and bring back old sighs and laughter
from days of girls and only feeling?

In the afternoon at your hard desk,
did you ever leave the odorless realms
to glance up into dust particles falling
through that wooden space of thinking?
Were those faint atoms ever hypnotizing,
until you saw beyond the window frame?

Ah...too bad you didn't have a friend
to visit you from tumbling Bavarian towns --
a friend to burst into the musty space
of migraine and folds of Faustian burden.

Had that friend come to you from wrong time,
he would have brought a banjo and a spade --
a banjo strung with absurdly chuckling strings,
a spade for pigments dug in different ground
for colors sighing onto passionate canvas.

Oh, Immanuel...do you hear that other German speaking?

He is telling tales through a crack in being.
He critiques your critiquing, your dull pen:

"Your days are plaster on the riddle!
You think your thought is bringing truth.
But thought and life are wrestling angels...

sweating inside Russian eggs,
twisting arms and guffawing,
going all the way to dreams,
until imagination opens...

Ecstatic truth leaps into art,
while buildings always crumble."