Ondioline

"It seems very pretty," she said when she finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand."

[musique-concrete]

From “Empty Words”

Meaning “homeland” — mulk (in Kashmir) — exactly how  my son demands milk. • Full-rhyme with Jhelum, the river nearest his home —  my father’s “realm.” • You can’t put a leaf between written and oral; that first A, or alif. • Letters. West to east Mum’s hand would write; Dad’s script goes east to west. Received. • Invader, to some —  neither here, nor there, with me —  our rhododendron. • Where migrating geese pause to sleep — somewhere, halfway is this pillow’s crease. • Now we separate for the first time, on our walk, at the kissing gate. • Old English “Deor” —  an exile’s lament, the past’s dark, half-opened door. • Yes, I know. Empty. But there’s just something between the p and the t. • At home in Grasmere —  thin mountain paths have me back, a boy in Kashmir. Zaffar Kunial

[musique-concrete]

[bearded boy]

Look for another! they urged. In that case I will never be pleased, I replied. If his saliva were not honey, the bees would never have invaded his mouth. Abu al-Ma’ali trans. Reuven Snir from Baghdad: The City in Verse

[musique-concrete]

Animals

Have you forgotten what we were like then when we were still first rate and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal we didn't need speedometers we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days Frank O’Hara

[musique-concrete]

Notes During Long Phone Conversation with Mother

for summer     she needs pretty dress    cotton

cotton               nottoc              coontt              tcoont                          toonct              tocnot              tocton       contot

Lydia Davis

[musique-concrete]

“Noisy Poem,”  Slavko Matković

[musique-concrete]

Even the Rain

What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain? But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain. “Our glosses / wanting in this world”—“Can you remember?” Anyone!—“when we thought / the poets taught” even the rain? After we died—That was it!—God left us in the dark. And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain. Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house. For mixers, my love, you’d poured—what?—even the rain. Of this pear-shaped orange’s perfumed twist, I will say: Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain. How did the Enemy love you—with earth? air? and fire? He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain. This is God’s site for a new house of executions? You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain? After the bones—those flowers—this was found in the urn: The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain. What was I to prophesy if not the end of the world? A salt pillar for the lonely lot, even the rain. How the air raged, desperate, streaming the earth with flames— To help burn down my house, Fire sought even the rain. He would raze the mountains, he would level the waves; he would, to smooth his epic plot, even the rain. New York belongs at daybreak to only me, just me— To make this claim Memory’s brought even the rain. They’ve found the knife that killed you, but whose prints are these? No one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain. Agha Shahid Ali

[musique-concrete]

Flowers by the Sea

When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s edge, unseen, the salt ocean lifts its form—chicory and daisies tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone but color and the movement—or the shape perhaps—of restlessness, whereas the sea is circled and sways peacefully upon its plantlike stem William Carlos Williams

[musique-concrete]

If you are squeamish

Don’t prod the beach rubble

Sappho trans. Mary Barnard

[musique-concrete]

The New Orthophonic

I

    clothesline summer tanager / sky     still and de stijl

II

two tomtits titter at two- mbly-doodled flower-drips intuiting that tulip’s lisp

III

whistlers and Whistler Gainsborough and grain burrowers ptarmigans and Parmigianino Basquiat and bananaquits passerines and Pissarro dodos and Dada Titian and titmice smews and sfumato warblers and Warhol ablaq and blackbirds Nighthawks and falcons flocks and Fluxus jays and Johns line and linnets El Greco and grackles kiwis and Weiwei form and formations

IV

A little black thing among the snow chirps chiri- chiri- chiar- oscuro.

V

a peacock sleeps: a dream ajar leaks fragments of a Fragonard

Walter Ancarrow

(via FOLDER)

[musique-concrete]

A Girl Ago

No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no Buttering. No making small contusions on the page But saying nothing no one has not said before. No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs. No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.                                                      Extinguish me from this. I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia, Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky.    No Dove.                                                       There is no thou to speak of.

Lucie Brock-Broido

[musique-concrete]

Islands

Old saints on millstones float with cats    To islands out at sea Whereon no female pelvis can    Threaten their agape.

Beyond the long arm of the Law,    Close to a shipping road, Pirates in their island lairs    Observe the pirate code.

Obsession with security    In Sovereigns prevails; His Highness and the People both    Pick islands for their jails.

Once, where detected worldlings now    Do penitential jobs, Exterminated species played    Who had not read their Hobbes.

His continental damage done,    Laid on an island shelf, Napoleon has five years more    To talk about himself.

How fascinating is that class    Whose only member is Me! Sappho, Tiberius and I    Hold forth beside the sea.

What is cosier than the shore    Of a lake turned inside out? How do all these other people    Dare to be about?

In democratic nudity    Their sexes lie; except By age or weight you could not tell    The keeping from the kept.

They go, she goes, thou goest, I go    To a mainland livelihood: Farmer and fisherman complain    The other has it good. W. H. Auden

[musique-concrete]

Bleecker Street, Summer

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin! When I press summer dusks together, it is a month of street accordions and sprinklers laying the dust, small shadows running from me. It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker, ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper; it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water down littered streets that lead you to no water, and gathering islands and lemons in the mind. There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame. I would undress you in the summer heat, and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came. Derek Walcott

[musique-concrete]

Question

Body my house my horse my hound what will I do when you are fallen Where will I sleep How will I ride What will I hunt Where can I go without my mount all eager and quick How will I know in thicket ahead is danger or treasure when Body my good bright dog is dead How will it be to lie in the sky without roof or door and wind for an eye With cloud for shift how will I hide? May Swenson

[musique-concrete]

The Grand Conversation

She. My people came from Korelitz where they grew yellow cucumbers and studied the Talmud. He. Mine pored over the mud of mangold- and potato-pits or flicked through kale plants from Comber as bibliomancers of old went a-flicking through deckle-mold. She. Mine would lie low in the shtetl when they heard the distant thunder stolen by the Cossacks. He. It was potato sacks lumped together on a settle mine found themselves lying under, the Peep O'Day Boys from Loughgall making Defenders of us all. She. Mine once controlled the sugar trade from the islets of Langerhans and were granted the deed to Charlottesville. He. Indeed? My people called a spade a spade and were admitted to the hanse of pike- and pickax-men, shovels leaning to their lean-to hovels. She. Mine were trained to make a suture after the bomb and the bombast have done their very worst. He. Between fearsad and verst we may yet construct our future as we've reconstructed our past and cry out, my love, each to each from his or her own quicken-queach. She. Each from his stand of mountain ash will cry out over valley farms spotlit with pear blossom. He. There some young Absalom picks his way through cache after cache of ammunition and small arms hidden in grain wells, while his nag tugs at a rein caught on a snag. Paul Muldoon

[musique-concrete]

Proud Songster

The thrushes sing as the sun is going, And the finches whistle in ones and pairs, And as it gets dark loud nightingales       In bushes Pipe, as they can when April wears,    As if all Time were theirs.

These are brand new birds of twelvemonths' growing, Which a year ago, or less than twain, No finches were, nor nightingales,       Nor thrushes, But only particles of grain,    And earth, and air, and rain. Thomas Hardy

[musique-concrete]

When was the best time to see India? At what period would the study of the Brazilian savages have afforded the purest satisfaction, and revealed them in their least adulterated state? Would it have been better to arrive in Rio in the eighteenth century with Bougainville, or in the sixteenth with Lery and Thevet? For every five years I move back in time, I am able to save a custom, gain a ceremony or share in another belief. But I know the texts too well not to realize that, by going back a century, I am at the same time forgoing data and lines of inquiry which would offer intellectual enrichment. And so I am caught within a circle from which there is no escape: the less human societies were able to communicate with each other and therefore to corrupt each other through contact, the less their respective emissaries were able to perceive the wealth and significance of their diversity. In short, I have only two possibilities: either I can be like some traveller of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveller chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality. I lose on both counts, and more seriously than may at first appear, for, while I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. I am subject to a double infirmity: all that I perceive offends me, and I constantly reproach myself for not seeing as much as I should.

Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman

[musique-concrete]

First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow When their bleating clouds the air Meet a vast unwelcome, know Nothing but a sunless glare. Newly stumbling to and fro All they find, outside the fold, Is a wretched width of cold. As they wait beside the ewe, Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies Hidden round them, waiting too, Earth's immeasurable surprise. They could not grasp it if they knew, What so soon will wake and grow Utterly unlike the snow. Philip Larkin