Lost in a Quatrain

It’s less the heart of darkness
than a darkness in the heart:
unfathomably pregnable –

impregnably apart.

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Everything Turns Out

So a man walks up to a stranger
on West 72nd Street and asks him:
“Have you ever been to California?”
“No,” the stranger says.

“Well,” the man continues,
“from what you’ve heard of it,
you think I should go?”
“Sure,” the stranger says.

So the man buys a plane ticket
and leaves that very day.
And everything turns out

the way it would have anyway.

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Donna and Me in a Cab

Donna and me carousing 

in a cab about a year ago 
construe the boffo-est most 
spot-on view (head-on or 
from behind) we've got of us.

Except one we can't find*
of Donna who'd admonished
me to sit where she'd alit,
atop a hippopotamus
named Deuteronymous.

(I was pictured climbing,
trembling, up his bottomus.)

But this shot snaps because
it catches her mid-laughter:
a more dangerous contagious

irrepressibility would not

attach to you from any other

laugh you'd hear from here
to Timbuktu to Caribou.
The things it makes you do!

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*Deuternonymous, we later

learned, preferred to be

anonymous: he may have

found a way to sneak into my

laptop’s files (he’s the only

hippo Google’s ever hired),

peek around until he found

the pic and go about deleting it.

But we’d like to keep that quiet.

Thanks for not repeating it.

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Significance of a Fallen Leaf

Grief is foreign to the fallen leaf. If its death be

breezily regarded as the price of an existence

barely noticed to begin with, that would easily unite

it to the rest of us and every other thing that lives.

That it brings its photosynthesizing power to

the care and feeding of its mother tree and sibling

leaves as they give theirs to both of them and to

themselves is their collective task: that all the leaves

had wherewithal to starve them all by falling from

their mother’s arms en masse were they to suffer

blast by fire or toxic gas or virus or tsunami

wouldn’t be alarming to the Cosmos: the event

would only be what evidently had to happen

to maintain the balance of the here-and-never-was-

nor-will-nor-can-be-here, the autonomic fugue

and counterpoint of physics’ buzz and silence,

attending to the necessary generative violence

of guarding existential equanimity – on which

depend the burps and spittle of existence. The only

answer to the question Being asks is yes of course

beyond a doubt what else am I but you? – what else

but you is there to do? “Yeah,” you sotto voce say,

“but what am I to be?” Think it up and be it. No

need for a decree. But please consider telling me.

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me & arcangelo corelli

Playing along with a recording of the Christmas Concerto by Arcangelo Corelli has turned out to be one of the greater musical delights I've gotten myself into. However, at least one apology is in order - about the rasp of the bow on the strings you'll hear at quiet parts (sometimes the notes don't 'speak'), a function of needing to get my bow re-haired and having not sufficiently removed the rosin from the strings before playing this. But my heart is really in this. And I think you'll get that. I also treasure the piece because I first played it at Middlebury, in my sophomore year, Larry Grob as my violin duet partner. It was and remains a musical highlight of my life.
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I'll try to amend my garbled spoken intro. The back and forth I talk about between me & my brilliant friend Reed Woodhouse which led me to look for & re-discover the Corelli had to do with this: Reed is a champion of Purcell, whose mastery of counterpoint and very individual uses of it in a huge variety of forms make him inarguably a major baroque composer. To me Purcell sounds antique despite all this & I became curious about how much contact Purcell had particularly with Italian baroque music: was it even fully formed by his time? Then I thought of Arcangelo Corelli (1653 -1713 ), who was born six years before Purcell (1659 - 1695) and whose Christmas Concerto, although apparently not performed until the early 1700s was written in 1690. (Very little of Corelli's music seems to have survived, but his concerto is so complete an example of the style, the style has to have been known; it couldn't have sprung whole from nothing.) So it seemed likely Purcell would have heard a fair amount of Italian baroque music in full bloom (I know he traveled in Italy). And yet he remained Purcell: resisting the Italian model to some degree. (Of course none of this matters really. He was great and so was Corelli!)
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Anyway I hope you enjoy what's transpired here. I played along with a recording which featured readable music, since I don't have the sheet music myself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RydMnTCwJvQ )
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but I first found a more wonderful recording I urge you to listen to conducted by violinist Gerald Elias
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch…
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whom I knew way back in the day (like junior high) in various Long Island string festivals - he along with Joseph McGauley and John Connelly whom I also knew back then & with whom I've reunited via Facebook have had stellar careers as violinists, which lord knows I cannot claim for myself. But we were all sort of in the running back in the day. (I wasn't the only Long Island kid going to Juilliard Prep.) All of the above has made this Corelli a treat for me to reune with. 

Propheteering

There’s little profit to the prophet

in the proffering of prophecy.

They’re either put in institutions

for the schizophrenic or arrested

for seditious libel or for rousing

to carousal any rabble-rouser

likely to espouse the zillion things

that go against the status quo.

Whatever prophecy they prophesy

they frequently don’t live to see

come true or not come true. Mightily

disliked if it construes a future doom –

unheeded, disbelieved if it foretells

an idiotically unlikely boon, all

in all, a prophet’s propheteering

is a thankless task. It’s no surprise

so many in my own acquaintance

I’ve found foundering at night along

dark piers and wharves in masks,

chugging devil-water out of flasks –

rather as I’ve done and surely more

than once again will do, when yet

another urgent revelation comes,

and drums into me the directive: 

spew.

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Homage to “Sea-Change”

On the 100^th year anniversary of its Resurrection as a Phrase

============================================

‘As a metaphor for radical change, “sea change” had legs,

as they say, although it certainly took a while to get going.

The first use of the term in print found (so far) after

Shakespeare's “The Tempest” in 1610 didn't come until

Ezra Pound's poem “Lustra” in 1917.’  The Word Detective

http://www.word-detective.com/2009/04/sea-change/

=====================================

Shakespeare invented it,

Ezra Pound found it

three hundred and seven

years later, refreshed it,

re-fleshed it allusively

into a poem called “Lustra”:

and so awoke it – blustering

up from its deep ocean

sleep soon to seep into

20^th century consciousness

via whatever the requisite

confluence was of what

neurotransmitters would

shuttle it into the regions

of reason from which it would

very soon influence us

to the core. And, oh! – there’s

been ever so very much more.

Sea-change restored, agents 

of change are now never a bore.

They're all a  heretical alchemy –

the immutable substance

of stuff now proves mutable –

go ahead: spin human hair

into gold. Our unity? Illimitable.

Each one of us? Inimitable.

Nothing’s new nor old.

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