Words in the Air

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

The Listeners

By Walter De La Mere

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

BY ROBERT FROST

O hushed October morning mild,
 

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
 

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
 

Should waste them all.
 

The crows above the forest call;
 

Tomorrow they may form and go.
 

O hushed October morning mild,
 

Begin the hours of this day slow.
 

Make the day seem to us less brief.
 

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
 

Beguile us in the way you know.
 

Release one leaf at break of day;
 

At noon release another leaf;
 

One from our trees, one far away.
 

Retard the sun with gentle mist;
 

Enchant the land with amethyst.
 

Slow, slow!
 

For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
 

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
 

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
 

For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design By Kevin Seaman

The Man-Moth” (written 1935, published 1936)

_Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”

Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.

The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.

It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,

and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.

He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,

feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,

of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.

But when the Man-Moth

pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,

the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges

from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks

and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.

He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,

proving the sky quite useless for protection.

He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

Up the façades,

his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him

he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage

to push his small head through that round clean opening

and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.

(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)

But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although

he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

Then he returns

to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,

he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains

fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.

The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way

and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,

without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.

He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

Each night he must

be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.

Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie

his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,

for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,

runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease

he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep

his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

If you catch him,

hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,

an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens

as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids

one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.

Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention

he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,

cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

The Auroras of Autumn Canto 5-10

V

The mother invites humanity to her house

And table. The father fetches tellers of tales

And musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales.

The father fetches negresses to dance,

Among the children, like curious ripenesses

Of pattern in the dance's ripening.

For these the musicians make insidious tones,

Clawing the sing-song of their instruments.

The children laugh and jangle a tinny time.

The father fetches pageants out of air,

Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods

And curtains like a naive pretence of sleep.

Among these the musicians strike the instinctive poem.

The father fetches his unherded herds,

Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves

Of breath, obedient to his trumpet's touch.

This then is Chatillon or as you please.

We stand in the tumult of a festival.

What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?

These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?

These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,

A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:

That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.

Or, the persons act one merely by being here.

VI

It is a theatre floating through the clouds,

Itself a cloud, although of misted rock

And mountains running like water, wave on wave,

Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed

To cloud transformed again, idly, the way

A season changes color to no end,

Except the lavishing of itself in change,

As light changes yellow into gold and gold

To its opal elements and fire's delight,

Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence

And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space

The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.

The theatre is filled with flying birds,

Wild wedges, as of a volcano's smoke, palm-eyed

And vanishing, a web in a corridor

Or massive portico. A capitol,

It may be, is emerging or has just

Collapsed. The denouement has to be postponed . . .

This is nothing until in a single man contained,

Nothing until this named thing nameless is

And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees

An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame

Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

VII

Is there an imagination that sits enthroned

As grim as it is benevolent, the just

And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops

To imagine winter? When the leaves are dead,

Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself,

Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting

In highest night? And do these heavens adorn

And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted

By extinguishings, even of planets as may be,

Even of earth, even of sight, in snow,

Except as needed by way of majesty,

In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala?

It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,

Extinguishing our planets, one by one,

Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where

We knew each other and of each other thought,

A shivering residue, chilled and foregone,

Except for that crown and mystical cabala.

But it dare not leap by chance in its own dark.

It must change from destiny to slight caprice.

And thus its jetted tragedy, its stele

And shape and mournful making move to find

What must unmake it and, at last, what can,

Say, a flippant communication under the moon.

VIII

There may be always a time of innocence.

There is never a place. Or if there is no time,

If it is not a thing of time, nor of place,

Existing in the idea of it, alone,

In the sense against calamity, it is not

Less real. For the oldest and coldest philosopher,

There is or may be a time of innocence

As pure principle. Its nature is its end,

That it should be, and yet not be, a thing

That pinches the pity of the pitiful man,

Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue,

Like a book on rising beautiful and true.

It is like a thing of ether that exists

Almost as predicate. But it exists,

It exists, it is visible, it is, it is.

So, then, these lights are not a spell of light,

A saying out of a cloud, but innocence.

An innocence of the earth and no false sign

Or symbol of malice. That we partake thereof,

Lie down like children in this holiness,

As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,

As if the innocent mother sang in the dark

Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard,

Created the time and place in which we breathed . . .

IX

And of each other thought—in the idiom

Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth,

Not of the enigma of the guilty dream.

We were as Danes in Denmark all day long

And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,

For whom the outlandish was another day

Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike

And that made brothers of us in a home

In which we fed on being brothers, fed

And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.

This drama that we live—We lay sticky with sleep.

This sense of the activity of fate—

The rendezvous, when she came alone,

By her coming became a freedom of the two,

An isolation which only the two could share.

Shall we be found hanging in the trees next s pring?

Of what disaster in this the imminence:

Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?

The stars are putting on their glittering belts.

They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash

Like a great shadow's last embellishment.

It may come tomorrow in the simplest word,

Almost as part of innocence, almost,

Almost as the tenderest and the truest part.

X

An unhappy people in a happy world—

Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.

An unhappy people in an unhappy world—

Here are too many mirrors for misery.

A happy people in an unhappy world—

It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll

On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.

A happy people in a happy world—

Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar.

Turn back to where we were when we began:

An unhappy people in a happy world.

Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.

Read to the congregation, for today

And for tomorrow, this extremity,

This contrivance of the spectre of the spheres,

Contriving balance to contrive a whole,

The vital, the never-failing genius,

Fulfilling his meditations, great and small.

In these unhappy he meditates a whole,

The full of fortune and the full of fate,

As if he lived all lives, that he might know,

In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,

To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights

Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter's nick.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

The Auroras of Autumn

by Wallace Stevens

I

This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.

His head is air. Beneath his tip at night

Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,

Another image at the end of the cave,

Another bodiless for the body's slough?

This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,

These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,

And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

This is form gulping after formlessness,

Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances

And the serpent body flashing without the skin.

This is the height emerging and its base

These lights may finally attain a pole

In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,

In another nest, the master of the maze

Of body and air and forms and images,

Relentlessly in possession of happiness.

This is his poison: that we should disbelieve

Even that. His meditations in the ferns,

When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,

Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,

Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,

The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.

II

Farewell to an idea . . . A cabin stands,

Deserted, on a beach. It is white,

As by a custom or according to

An ancestral theme or as a consequence

Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall

Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark

Reminding, trying to remind, of a white

That was different, something else, last year

Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon,

Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud

Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.

The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.

Here, being visible is being white,

Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment

Of an extremist in an exercise . . .

The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.

The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,

A darkness gathers though it does not fall

And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.

The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.

He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,

With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps

And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,

The color of ice and fire and solitude.

III

Farewell to an idea . . . The mother's face,

The purpose of the poem, fills the room.

They are together, here, and it is warm,

With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams.

It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.

Only the half they can never possess remains,

Still-starred. It is the mother they possess,

Who gives transparence to their present peace.

She makes that gentler that can gentle be.

And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.

She gives transparence. But she has grown old.

The necklace is a carving not a kiss.

The soft hands are a motion not a touch.

The house will crumble and the books will burn.

They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

And the house is of the mind and they and time,

Together, all together. Boreal night

Will look like frost as it approaches them

And to the mother as she falls asleep

And as they say good-night, good-night. Upstairs

The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.

A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round

And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.

The wind will command them with invincible sound.

IV

Farewell to an idea . . . The cancellings,

The negations are never final. The father sits

In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard,

As one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes.

He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes

To no; and in saying yes he says farewell.

He measures the velocities of change.

He leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly

Than bad angels leap from heaven to hell in flam es.

But now he sits in quiet and green-a-day.

He assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them

From cloud to cloudless, cloudless to keen clear

In flights of eye and ear, the highest eye

And the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns,

At evening, things that attend it until it hears

The supernatural preludes of its own,

At the moment when the angelic eye defines

Its actors approaching, in company, in their masks.

Master O master seated by the fire

And yet in space and motionless and yet

Of motion the ever-brightening origin,

Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown,

Look at this present throne. What company,

In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?

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

Production And Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Nathan Hoks is the author of two books of poetry, Reveilles and The Narrow Circle, which was a winner of the 2012 National Poetry Series and published by Penguin. His translations, poems, and critical writings have appeared in journals such as The Colorado Review, jubilat, Crazyhorse, Lit, Circumference, Octopus Magazine, and Verse. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Hoks works as an editor and letterpress printer for Convulsive Editions, a micro-press that publishes chapbooks and broadsides.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design By Kevin Seaman

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman