Words in the Air

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Misery and Splendor

BY ROBERT HASS

Summoned by conscious recollection, she

would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking,

before or after dinner. But they are in this other room,

the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch

embracing. He holds her as tightly  

as he can, she buries herself in his body.

Morning, maybe it is evening, light

is flowing through the room. Outside,

the day is slowly succeeded by night,

succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly

and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room

does not change, so it is plain what is happening.

They are trying to become one creature,

and something will not have it. They are tender

with each other, afraid

their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment

when they fall away again. So they rub against each other,

their mouths dry, then wet, then dry.

They feel themselves at the center of a powerful

and baffled will. They feel

they are an almost animal,

washed up on the shore of a world—

or huddled against the gate of a garden—

to which they can’t admit they can never be admitted.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

The Forgotten Madmen of Ménilmontant

after Jacques Prévert

Do not look sadly at days gone by

days below days like a river running under the stars

Do not listen to the blues

or speak often with priests

Do not think the rich women enrolled in the college of nightfall

will always smell the same way

Everytime the tree works the leaves dream

Everytime I carve the dead wing my name

in the dark lamp of the outhouse

I said everytime I cut my name

in the old wood rotten as a tugboat

I know I am always with you

Everytime the schoolboy’s bad moon

dowses blood from the virgin’s stone thighs

I know I am handsome and young and drunk

eternal as a weed

It will not smell the same

Everytime I open a bottle of wine

and see a snake doctor under my bed

I know there is something coming and eternal

like taking off a white coat over the body of the dead

Poets have done this before

Poets have made love and gathered at the cheap joints

they’ve cut their fingers toasting one another’s death

Poets have made love

and remained thick

they’ve gotten cold feet at the crucial moments

when left alone with the students with sad eyes

Do not die in the wintertime

for there is no okra or sailboats

It will not smell the same

that twig of blood or the chiffonier

Do not listen to hunting dogs in autumn

or tie yellow flies for the small lips of desperate friends

Poets have done this before

and they’ve wandered off alone and unheard of

to bury the caul of their own stillborn

Like a voice the odor has changed

Dust under the hooves of a horse

running side by side with the fog

a book in the hands of a fool

Cheese and fish and spinsters

are the body of the poet

for the poet does not eat black bread

he gives it to the poor

Everytime a mare throws a foal in an exile’s country

I know I am with you

a gun in the hand of a fool

The poet forgets in remembrance of you

he is the lunatic’s left hand man

on Sundays the acolyte of the moon

he is night following other nights

the eyes of the blind

the stranger your wife leaves with

when you’re still talking with your youth

stowed away on the ship of death

and it will not smell the same

Everytime I see a young man

tuck his knife back in his vest

I want to say forget it and drink

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Phrases

BY ARTHUR RIMBAUD

TRANSLATED BY WALLACE FOWLIE

When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our two pairs of dazzled eyes—to a beach for two faithful children—to a musical house for our clear understanding—then I shall find you.

     When there is only one old man on earth, lonely, peaceful, handsome, living in unsurpassed luxury, then I am at your feet.

     When I have realized all your memories, —when I am the girl who can tie your hands,—then I will stifle you.

     When we are very strong, who draws back? or very happy, who collapses from ridicule? When we are very bad, what can they do to us.

     Dress up, dance, laugh. I will never be able to throw Love out of the window.

     —Comrade of mine, beggar girl, monstrous child! How little you care about the wretched women, and the machinations and my embarrassment. Join us with your impossible voice, oh your voice! the one flatterer of this base despair.

 *    *    *

     A dark morning in July. The taste of ashes in the air, the smell of wood sweating in the hearth, steeped flowers, the devastation of paths, drizzle over the canals in the fields, why not already playthings and incense?

*    *    *

      I stretched out ropes from spire to spire; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.

*    *    *

    The high pond is constantly streaming. What witch will rise up against the white sunset? What purple flowers are going to descend?        

*    *    *

While public funds disappear in brotherly celebrations, a bell of pink are rings in the clouds.

*    *    *

    Arousing a pleasant taste of Chinese ink, a black powder gently rains on my night, —I lower the jets of the chandelier, throw myself on the bed, and turning toward thedark, I see you, O my daughters and queens!

*    *    *

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

The Truth the Dead Know

By Anne Sexton

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959

and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,

refusing the stiff procession to the grave,

letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,

where the sea swings in like an iron gate

and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones

from the whitehearted water and when we touch

we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes

in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse

to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

To Elsie

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

The pure products of America

go crazy—

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of

Jersey

with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves

old names

and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken

to railroading

out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed

in filth

from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night

with gauds

from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them

character

but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags—succumbing without

emotion

save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry

or viburnum—

which they cannot express—

Unless it be that marriage

perhaps

with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate

so hemmed round

with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an

agent—

reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in

some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs—

some doctor's family, some Elsie—

voluptuous water

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—

her great

ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap

jewelry

and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet

were

an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners

destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains

after deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

Somehow

it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that

something

is given off

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Ode on Solitude

By Alexander Pope

Happy the man, whose wish and care

  A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air,

                           In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,

  Whose flocks supply him with attire,

Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

                           In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcernedly find

  Hours, days, and years slide soft away,

In health of body, peace of mind,

                           Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,

  Together mixed; sweet recreation;

And innocence, which most does please,

                           With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

  Thus unlamented let me die;

Steal from the world, and not a stone

                           Tell where I lie.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Mystery and Solitude in Topeka

BY MARK STRAND

Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Nocturne

BY LOUISE GLÜCK

Mother died last night,

Mother who never dies.

Winter was in the air,

many months away

but in the air nevertheless.

It was the tenth of May.

Hyacinth and apple blossom

bloomed in the back garden.

We could hear

Maria singing songs from Czechoslovakia —

How alone I am —

songs of that kind.

How alone I am,

no mother, no father —

my brain seems so empty without them.

Aromas drifted out of the earth;

the dishes were in the sink,

rinsed but not stacked.

Under the full moon

Maria was folding the washing;

the stiff  sheets became

dry white rectangles of  moonlight.

How alone I am, but in music

my desolation is my rejoicing.

It was the tenth of May

as it had been the ninth, the eighth.

Mother slept in her bed,

her arms outstretched, her head

balanced between them.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman