Yes, it’s been that long. Yes, I’ve been seemingly quiet, but no such thing in real life. Soon to follow is my latest report, but first I want to share a significant part of the soundtrack to the work I’ve been composing, including last night’s (as I prepare to work again). My main teacher is still Dorothy Love Coates, but this song, and performance, carry me almost too high for words:
3 February 2015
3
Say To You Your Name
You read your roommate an old solemn testament’s power of oath right out loud, till they cried
for the most holy angels to signal their presence, and then shadow over the sea so long skied,
the lorn and lone source of true words came well over the both of us. Then we lay down and fell still.
Music, so like a religion, will play itself forwards and back, but if ever ill-will
should take notice of why it’s a frail lonely pallor away from the graveyard, whilst still seeking rain?
Then it’s a weird sort of presence; a dear lovely human who’s reading a mirror of pain,
resolving their own beyond-wholly-unholy recordings of one human shadow cast real
out of sad, lonely, poured-out-of-misery readings of poems I don’t know how to measure. The wheel,
the great flapping masses of huge dove-grey visions play, over and over, in sight of my tears;
their wheel sees the fulness and turn of the Moon meet a river’s low watershed many wild years
have driven toward a low, half-settled place, a haven of ancient reminders of your—
sacred littoral, living alive in a place we were born to behold, but far more—to adore—
for there, in that sad small salt pocket of skin that was where we once carried our far-inland food—
I shall stand tall on a mountain that must have been clam-shells and deerbones. A lover once wooed
the woman who ran with a foal by her side. Her vision was strong, and it carried out far,
but she will lie always alone in the night till the stars shine aright and he questions her star.
If she wakes up in the darkest dark night with her heart in her throat, and her skin slick with sweat,
won’t the most terrible ghost of the half-woken Earth knows she’s dying, but cannot die yet?
Read to me, sharer of rooms in the places where silent Earth shadows bear eaves that cast light.
Woe-holy angels, I need you to know me. Need we turn aside at first shadow-cast sight?
Reel like a wild band of wings in a spiral of gladder than glad uphill motion. Please be
the reason I woke up too early. I fed you; and maybe a little too much, but—we’ll see
long scrolling lines flying fast over a page in which so much true song turns to beauty more true—
and then in the close of an eye, till it opens again—If Love ends here, its last word was You.
I’m still officially Spiritual-But-Not-Religious, whilst growing more and more spiritual every day.
Rain Harp 