Words in the Air

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

              Mirrors

By Jorge Luis Borges

I have been horrified before all mirrors

not just before the impenetrable glass,

the end and the beginning of that space,

inhabited by nothing but reflections,

but faced with specular water, mirroring

the other blue within its bottomless sky,

incised at times by the illusory flight

of inverted birds, or troubled by a ripple,

or face to face with the unspeaking surface

of ghostly ebony whose very hardness

reflects, as if within a dream, the whiteness

of spectral marble or a spectral rose.

Now, after so many troubling years

of wandering beneath the wavering moon,

I ask myself what accident of fortune

handed to me this terror of all mirrors–

mirrors of metal and the shrouded mirror

of sheer mahogany which in the twilight

of its uncertain red softens the face

that watches and in turn is watched by it.

I look on them as infinite, elemental

fulfillers of a very ancient pact

to multiply the world, as in the act

of generation, sleepless and dangerous.

They extenuate this vain and dubious world

within the web of their own vertigo.

Sometimes at evening they are clouded over

by someone's breath, someone who is not dead.

The glass is watching us. And if a mirror

hangs somewhere on the four walls of my room,

I am not alone. There's an other, a reflection

which in the dawn enacts its own dumb show.

Everything happens, nothing is remembered

in those dimensioned cabinets of glass

in which, like rabbits in fantastic stories,

we read the lines of text from right to left.

Claudius, king for an evening, king in a dream,

did not know he was a dream until the day

on which an actor mimed his felony

with silent artifice, in a tableau.

Strange, that there are dreams, that there are mirrors.

Strange that the ordinary, worn-out ways

of every day encompass the imagined

and endless universe woven by reflections.

God (I've begun to think) implants a promise

in all that insubstantial architecture

that makes light out of the impervious surface

of glass, and makes the shadow out of dreams.

God has created nights well-populated

with dreams, crowded with mirror images,

so that man may feel that he is nothing more

than vain reflection. That's what frightens us.

                       Spanish; trans. Alastair Reid

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Crossroads in the Past

BY JOHN ASHBERY

That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,

but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.

“That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?

‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do

when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”

I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.

Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject.

No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know

exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could

seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?

I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone

with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel

with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,

on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.

We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,

talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know

that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean.

I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some

sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater

had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards

drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves

sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly

crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully

know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly

amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Fears and Scruples  (1876)
by Robert Browning

  Here's my case. Of old I used to love him,
    This same unseen friend, before I knew:
Dream there was none like him, none above him,—
    Wake to hope and trust my dream was true.

Loved I not his letters full of beauty?
    Not his actions famous far and wide?
Absent, he would know I vowed him duty;
    Present, he would find me at his side.

Pleasant fancy! for I had but letters,
    Only knew of actions by hearsay:
He himself was busied with my betters;
    What of that? My turn must come some day.

"Some day" proving—no day! Here's the puzzle.
    Passed and passed my turn is. Why complain?
He's so busied! If I could but muzzle
    People's foolish mouths that give me pain!

"Letters?" (hear them!) "You a judge of writing?
    Ask the experts! How they shake the head
O'er these characters, your friend's inditing—
    Call them forgery from A to Z!

"Actions? Where's your certain proof" (they bother)
    "He, of all you find so great and good,
He, he only, claims this, that, the other
    Action—claimed by men, a multitude?"

I can simply wish I might refute you,
    Wish my friend would,—by a word, a wink,—
Bid me stop that foolish mouth,—you brute you!
    He keeps absent,—why, I cannot think.

Never mind! Though foolishness may flout me,
    One thing's sure enough: 'tis neither frost,
No, nor fire, shall freeze or burn from out me
    Thanks for truth—though falsehood, gained—though lost.

All my days, I'll go the softlier, sadlier,
    For that dream's sake! How forget the thrill
Through and through me as I thought "The gladlier
    Lives my friend because I love him still!"

Ah, but there's a menace some one utters!
    "What and if your friend at home play tricks
Peep at hide-and-seek behind the shutters?
    Mean your eyes should pierce through solid bricks?

"What and if he, frowning, wake you, dreamy?
    Lay on you the blame that bricks—conceal?
Say 'At least I saw who did not see me,
    Does see now, and presently shall feel'?"

"Why, that makes your friend a monster!" say you:
    "Had his house no window? At first nod,
Would you not have hailed him?" Hush, I pray you!
    What if this friend happen to be—God?

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45470/crossing-brooklyn-ferry

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

One Night in Balthazar

By Fanny Howe

The hotel bar downstairs

was dirty and dark and almost empty

except for him whom I didn’t know

I lost my balance

because evil is aroused by absence

Outside on the island

a brick city had grown up and old

A person could only nibble on its shadows

Where was my beloved?

The cornerstone was familiar

but unrecognizable

and I didn’t understand why infinity

was seeping into my hair

Somebody said:

“He’s out of his bottle”

I guess it meant

Temporarily out of service and empty.

But then there was Arsene

beside the last remaining cabin

wandering with his eyes on the camera

Dynamite in his pocket

and a piece of thread

to trap a rabbit.

Evil is a growing thing

It has its own gravity

and never answers to its name

It is a hole into chaos. It is real

Arsene held me in his arms

He was drunk as usual

and his nipple smelled of rum

But still I loved him—

loved him madly!—

as if he was the one

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

BY BOB KAUFMAN

A terror is more certain than all the rare desirable popular songs I
know, than even now when all of my myths have become . . . , & walk
around in black shiny galoshes & carry dirty laundry to & fro, & read
great books & don’t know criminals intimately, & publish fat books of
the month & have wifeys that are lousy in bed & never realize how
bad my writing is because i am poor & symbolize myself.

A certain desirable is more terror to me than all that’s rare. How
come they don’t give an academic award to all the movie stars that
die? they’re still acting, ain’t they? even if they are dead, it should
not be held against them, after all they still have the public on their
side, how would you like to be a dead movie star & have people sit-
ting on your grave?

A rare me is more certain than desirable, that’s all the terror, there
are too many basketball players in this world & too much progress
in the burial industry, lets have old fashioned funerals & stand
around & forgive & borrow wet handkerchiefs, & sneak out for
drinks & help load the guy into the wagon, & feel sad & make a
date with the widow & believe we don’t see all of the people sink-
ing into the subways going to basketball games & designing baby
sitters at Madison Square Garden.

A certain me is desirable, what is so rare as air in a Poem, why can’t
i write a foreign movie like all the other boys my age, I confess to all
the crimes committed during the month of April, but not to save
my own neck, which is adjustable, & telescopes into any size noose,
I’m doing it to save Gertrude Stein’s reputation, who is secretly
flying model airplanes for the underground railroad stern gang of
oz, & is the favorite in all the bouts . . . not officially opened yet
Holland tunnel is the one who writes untrue phone numbers.

A desirable poem is more rare than rare, & terror is certain, who
wants to be a poet & work a twenty four hour shift, they never ask
you first, who wants to listen to the radiator play string quartets all
night. I want to be allowed not to be, suppose a man wants to
swing on the kiddie swings, should people be allowed to stab him
with queer looks & drag him off to bed & its no fun on top of a
lady when her hair is full of shiny little machines & your ass
reflected in that television screen, who wants to be a poet if you
fuck on t.v. & all those cowboys watching.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Aubade

by Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.    

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.    

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.    

Till then I see what’s really always there:    

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,    

Making all thought impossible but how    

And where and when I shall myself die.    

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse    

—The good not done, the love not given, time    

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because    

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;    

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,    

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,    

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,    

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,    

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill    

That slows each impulse down to indecision.    

Most things may never happen: this one will,    

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without    

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave    

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.    

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,    

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,    

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring    

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Poems Read:

The Solstice By W.S. Merwin

Der Leiermann by Wilhelm Müller

&

Snowfall by Mark Strand

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

I remember walking out of the ocean. What struggle!
Millions of mollusk years and shell games that hurt.
I remember getting up from all fours and looking down
on all my astonished variously shaped former friends.
Not one of them wanted to look up at me now I was up.
Bipedal and lonely until there were a bunch of others.
I remember the first scene in 2001 where I killed another.
I remember that every time I bent down to be closer
to the busy world of things that crawled loped or burrowed
I was condescending and they moved away from me.
I remember towering over everything that wasn’t me.
I remember the day I howled in pain because my back gave out.
That was the day I knew my body was weakly hinged
at the place where it first stood up, and I wanted down again.
Lord, help me walk on all fours again. I know that it’s late.
We only grow taller now like the towers we can’t stop building.
Since we got language not one nonhuman creature deigns
to speak to us though we pretend in vain to understand them.
Animals find it more understandable when we shoot them
then when we kneel down and pretend we are their friends.
We do kneel down often to pray not to commune but pray
that we won’t suffer from the back pain that is our sign of Cain.
I remember that I can still return to water and do flips
but I’m in charge now of all the things I covered over.
I remember kneeling to gods who were so tall I couldn’t see them.
Their heads were in the clouds, we barely reached their sandals.
Even the mono god was so tall he dropped the tablets on Moses
and made lightning to scare us all to the death we knew was coming.
In the little world I live in I sell diminishment at one dollar an inch
and practice quadripedal yoga every morning in my living room
hoping to walk one day into the street with my quadripedal brood.
It will be the day of no pain and of trading language for nozzling.
If we succeed it won’t be so hard to hope that learning screens hurts
less than when we first left the ocean, equally pushed by hubris.
Our new weak spot is memory. A bad back and a lousy memory
may smooth our way to becoming humble and wild again and good.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman