Stillness, poetry and music

Mary is generally very good at living. She is highly intelligent, well-educated, and enviably successful at making sound and moral decisions in her life. She also happens to be a poet with a marvelous knack for transforming the familiar and forgotten into something odd, gentle and worth remembering:

Somewhere Between Here and There

At dusk, when tide is low, the silver water turns dull
unpolished and scratched by wind that growls
across the tips of waves, choppy as a see-saw.
The fish are lined up on the shore like soldiers,
washed up after bobbing along the froth.
Rattling, red-brown leaves shake on branches
and, shaking off inhibitions, fly away with a dry rustle,
scratching together airborn–like insect wings.
The smell of the salt off the sea is dry;
it sticks in the throat before the wind
changes directions, but leaves a scaly aftertaste.
The fish on the sand are the biggest I’ve ever seen,
swollen and half-buried beneath drifts of salt and sand.
I reached over and traced the edges of the scales,
dry instead of wet, glinting like well-worn pennies.
Their mouths were open tunnels, big enough to hold
a matchbox racecar, but lined with white teeth,
tiny as maggots, nothing inside but ink.
The eye sockets were deep and dark,
the gelatinous membranes eaten away,
empty as a playroom outgrown and abandoned
somewhere between here and there.

Songs of ours where Mary’s poetry can be heard:

An old piece of mine called One Of Many Dinner Conversations [mp3 6.3MB], and two songs off of the new album, A Maze and Amazement, called Solitaire [video on cliptip] and Remember The Stillness.

Remember The Stillness
Solitaire

I can’t rememember the precise moment when I started paying more attention to the combination of spoken word and music, but suffice it to say it’s been a few years now, and my interest in it continues to intensify. Here are three marvelous examples from the classical world:

Exerpt from Knee 5 by Philip Glass (from his opera “Einstein On The Beach”):

Philip Glass – Knee 5

Exerpt from Steve Reich’s The Cave:

Exerpt from Delta Run by Annea Lockwood:

Annea Lockwood – Delta Run

• Add this post to: delcious · digg · facebook · technorati · reddit
• Author and date: Mark (2007-10-30)
• Categories: A Maze And Amazement · Composition · Diary · Downloads · Videos
• Permalink: Stillness, poetry and music
• Comments: Comments (4)

Dayvan Cowboy

Just for a moment my world is brightly lit. Boards of Canada is droning major chords through my sun-flooded living room, thick with glittering dust. Today is spring cleaning day; tomorrow might yet be beautiful; next month I will let myself fall into the great America; and next year everything is possible again.

 

 Darkwave = MC Squared [2:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

• Add this post to: delcious · digg · facebook · technorati · reddit
• Author and date: Mark (2007-10-25)
• Categories: Diary
• Permalink: Dayvan Cowboy
• Comments: Comments (0)