The Freshness

Here is a poem by Paul Eluard, one of the surrealist
writers.
Fitting especially for that February Hallmark Holiday.


Repetitions


A heart on that tree, you have but to pluck it,
To smile a while, laughter and the sweet of beyond 
sense.
The vanquished, victorious and luminous, pure as 
an angel,
    High towards the skies with the trees.

Far off a maiden is sighing,
Who fain would struggle
But cannot, lying
At the foot
Of the hill;
And be the skies bleak or transparent
Too see is to love her.

The days like fingers twist their battalions,
    The flowers are dried, their seeds are all lost,
And the dog-star is waiting the great white frost.
To the eye of the dead pauper. To paint porcelain.
     A music, bare white arms.
The winds and the birds unite - the sky changes.

Copyright 1922.  Paul Eluard.



Happy new year,  this is a 
piece that someone gave me a few years back by
 Tony Hoagland.


Self-Improvement


Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:

Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed 
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.

Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
met someone, apres-ski, who,
using nothing but his nose
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.

Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.


Copyright Date Unknown. Tony Hoagland.





As we walk into the winter's winds becoming engulfed
in the ritualized practice of the holidays, we can stop &
take note of our inspirations. I found this piece to be
equally moving and insightful. It's about Ludwig Van
Beethoven, the great composer and musician and it 
comes in enough time for the upcoming biopic
starring Ed Harris.


Beethoven

Listen
his father
made a habit
out of hitting him
see
some men drink
some men yell
some men hit the children
this man 
did it all
because I guess all men
want their boys
to be geniuses

Beethoven

little boy
living in a house
where a name meant nothing
living in a house
where mercy had to be earned
through each perfect note
tumbling up through the roof
to tickle the toes of angels
whose harps
couldn't hold half the passion
that was held in the hands
of a young boy
who was hard of hearing

Beethoven

who heard his father's anthem
every time he put finger
to ivory
it was
not good enough
so he played slowly
not good enough
so he played strongly
and when he could play no more
when his fingers cramped up
into the gnarled roots of tree trunks
it was
not good enough

Beethoven

a musician
without his most precious tool
his eardrums
could no longer pound out rhythms
for the symphonies playing in his mind
he couldn't hear the audiences clapping
couldn't hear the people loving him
couldn't hear the women in the front row 
     whispering

Beethoven

as they let the music
invade their nervous system
like an armada marching through
firing cannonballs
detonating every molecule in their bodies
into explosions of heavenly sensation
each note
leaving track marks
over every inch of their bodies
making them ache
for one more hit
he was an addiction
and kings/queens
it didn't matter
the man got down on his knees
for no one
but amputated the legs of his piano
so he could feel the vibrations
through the floor
the man got down on his knees
for music
and when the orchestra played his symphonies
it was the echoes of his father's anthem
repeating itself
like a brok-broken recor-brok-broken record
it was
not good enough
so they played slowly
not good enough 
so they played softly
not good enough
so they played strongly
not good enough
so they tried to mock the man
make fun of the madness
by mimicking the movements
holding their bows
a quarter inch above the strings
not making a sound
it was

perfect

see
the deaf have an intimacy with silence
it's there in their dreams
and the musicians turned to one another
not knowing what to make of the man
trying to calculate
the distance between madness and genius
realizing that Beethoven's musical measurements
could take you to distances
reaching past the towers of Babylon
turning solar systems into symbols
that crashed together
causing comets to collide
creating crescendos that were so loud
they shook the constellations
until the stars began to fall from the sky
and it looked like the entire universe
had begun to cry

distance must be an illusion
the man must be
a genius

Beethoven

his thoughts moving at the speed of sound
transforming emotion into music
and for a moment
it was like joy
was a tangible thing
like you could touch it
like for the first time
we could watch love and hate dance together
in a waltz of such precision and beauty
that we finally understood
the history wasn't important
to know the man
all we ever had to do was

listen.

Copyright 2004. Shane Koyczan.



The spotlight is on Lynne C. Fadden 
for both months of October and November.
What Fadden has done with her piece
"Reflections" is nothing short of written 
divinity. The entire poem is a palindrome 
(every word in the piece reads
the same backward or forward.)



Reflections

Life-

imitates nature,

always moving, traveling continuously.

Falling leaves placed delicately;

foliage touching the echoing waters,

clarity removed -

Reflections distorted through waves rippling;

gracefully dancing

mirrored images

- reflect -

images mirrored.

Dancing gracefully,

rippling waves through distorted reflections -

removed clarity.

Waters echoing the touching foliage;

delicately placed leaves falling -

continuously traveling, moving always,

nature imitates

life.

Copyright 2002. Lynne C. Fadden