When your family is in Arizona because your brother and his wife and two little girls are moving, and you're at home alone, at the foothill of the mountain with a snow-packed and -drifted lane, your lungs rigid with bronchitis, it's super nice to get a call at 10 PM from your aunt next door, letting you know that she and her husband, your dad's youngest brother, will be over in an instant, ready to drive you to the doctor or the ER or just bring you soup, if you think you need it.
It's good to know you can count on family. Thanks, Nancy.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Sound Mind
The more I live the life of music the more I am convinced that it is the freely imaginative mind that is at the core of all vital music making…An imaginative mind is essential to the creation of art in any medium, but it is even more essential in music precisely because it is the freest, the most abstract, the least fettered of all the arts. --Aaron Copland
Sometimes,
when my brain is littered
with pieces of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier,
heaps of String Quartets,
Shostakovich Symphonies, Rachmaninov Etudes
and Requiems;
when my mind begins
to lounge amidst
the supple sexiness of Melody Gardot's ballads and songs--
the verve with which
The Paris Combo spins a joking scale--
the poignant throb inside
an Orpheus and Euridice--
it's all I can do to remain
sanely, confidently
connected to the balance of a world outside myself.
So much sound sings and I am possessed.
Inexplicably, I turn
inward
and listen,
beguiled by the musics of other men.
It is an ecstasy,
becoming lost and not lost among
the antecedents and their consequents
(these: the questions worked out and answered by Chopin and Chicago and Sinatra),
and I find peace.
But I am afraid, too,
when my sound mind is seduced--
I remember Beethoven
muttering and humming his symphonies to himself, hair-wild and stammering on a street.
outside
apart
alone
An apostle or an amusement:
a crazy man people quickly pass.
Sometimes,
when my brain is littered
with pieces of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier,
heaps of String Quartets,
Shostakovich Symphonies, Rachmaninov Etudes
and Requiems;
when my mind begins
to lounge amidst
the supple sexiness of Melody Gardot's ballads and songs--
the verve with which
The Paris Combo spins a joking scale--
the poignant throb inside
an Orpheus and Euridice--
it's all I can do to remain
sanely, confidently
connected to the balance of a world outside myself.
So much sound sings and I am possessed.
Inexplicably, I turn
inward
and listen,
beguiled by the musics of other men.
It is an ecstasy,
becoming lost and not lost among
the antecedents and their consequents
(these: the questions worked out and answered by Chopin and Chicago and Sinatra),
and I find peace.
But I am afraid, too,
when my sound mind is seduced--
I remember Beethoven
muttering and humming his symphonies to himself, hair-wild and stammering on a street.
outside
apart
alone
An apostle or an amusement:
a crazy man people quickly pass.
Things That Just Fit
- an old pair of perfect jeans
- a quiet corner of the library
- chai tea after a blizzard
- mom's arms
- neruda
- movies at midnight
- merry-go-rounds
- english toffee on Christmas eve
- A 440
...we're playing together again!!!
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