Quotes about tuning, page 11
In Winter Still
The axe through the wooden piles plows through
Cleaving, a wintry fog and dry rain leaving,
And chips of timber and clovers left in silence pondering
To cleave, splitting a rock in twain
To cleave, each half of the rock once did to each other
To leave, to cleave and no longer to cleave
A subtle rebirth in passive cycles, yielding the calves
In rebuttal to sterile winter staleness, triggering the valves
Of life beyond winter’s paleness, and winter’s comfort
A world of water, a planet of liquid, full of motion
Churning like oceans as leaves are turned on trees
Tuning to the shape of the wind in flexible notions
The boughs unyielding, in fruit and frozen in place
In still pursuit of life again from hibernation, a close
Of remembrance, hoping to shine in snowy clothing
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poem by Hunter Hansen
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Upon The Translation Of The Psalms By Sir Philip Sidney And The Countess Of Pembroke, His Sister
ETERNAL God—for whom who ever dare
Seek new expressions, do the circle square,
And thrust into straight corners of poor wit
Thee, who art cornerless and infinite—
I would but bless Thy name, not name Thee now
—And Thy gifts are as infinite as Thou—
Fix we our praises therefore on this one,
That, as thy blessed Spirit fell upon
These Psalms' first author in a cloven tongue
—For 'twas a double power by which he sung
The highest matter in the noblest form—
So thou hast cleft that Spirit, to perform
That work again, and shed it here, upon
Two, by their bloods, and by Thy Spirit one ;
A brother and a sister, made by Thee
The organ, where Thou art the harmony.
Two that make one John Baptist's holy voice,
And who that Psalm, 'Now let the Isles rejoice,'
Have both translated, and applied it too,
Both told us what, and taught us how to do.
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poem by John Donne
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The Sound of the Spheres
The Rastenberg Philharmonic had sat,
Were shuffling in their seats,
And tuning their various instruments
To play ‘The Survivor Suite'.
It had only been played just once before,
They knew they were taking a chance,
The conductor and several cellists had gone
Right after Svrili's Dance!
One moment, the baton was waved in the air,
The next, the podium was clear,
A cellist had sawed at an awful E flat
Before he had disappeared;
Then holes had appeared in the group at the front
Where cellists and violins sat,
And all that was left of the treble bassoon
Was a sandwich, under his hat.
It wasn't as if they hadn't been warned
For Borchnik appeared on the stage,
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poem by David Lewis Paget
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Youth and Art
1 It once might have been, once only:
2 We lodged in a street together,
3 You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,
4 I, a lone she-bird of his feather.
5 Your trade was with sticks and clay,
6 You thumbed, thrust, patted and polished,
7 Then laughed 'They will see some day
8 Smith made, and Gibson demolished.'
9 My business was song, song, song;
10 I chirped, cheeped, trilled and twittered,
11 'Kate Brown's on the boards ere long,
12 And Grisi's existence embittered!'
13 I earned no more by a warble
14 Than you by a sketch in plaster;
15 You wanted a piece of marble,
16 I needed a music-master.
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poem by Robert Browning
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Strict Joy
To-day i felt as poor O’Brien did
When, turning from all else that was not his,
He took himself to that which was his own
— He took him to his verse — for other all he had not,
And (tho’ man will crave and seek)
Another all than this he did not need
So, pen in hand he tried to tell the whole tale of his woe
In rhyming; lodge the full weight of his grief in versing: and so did:
Then — when his poem had been conned and cared,
And all put in that should not be left out — did he not find and with astonishment,
That grief had been translated, or was come
Other and better than it first looked to be:
And that this happened, because all things transfer
From what they seem to what they truly are
When they are innocently brooded on
— And, so, The poet makes grief beautiful.
“Behold me now, with my back to the wall,
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poem by James Stephens
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Lectures to Women on Physical Science
I.
PLACE. -- A small alcove with dark curtains.
The class consists of one member.
SUBJECT. -- Thomson’s Mirror Galvanometer.
The lamp-light falls on blackened walls,
And streams through narrow perforations,
The long beam trails o’er pasteboard scales,
With slow-decaying oscillations.
Flow, current, flow, set the quick light-spot flying,
Flow current, answer light-spot, flashing, quivering, dying,
O look! how queer! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, sharper growing
The gliding fire! with central wire,
The fine degrees distinctly showing.
Swing, magnet, swing, advancing and receding,
Swing magnet! Answer dearest, What's your final reading?
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poem by James Clerk Maxwell
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History Before Was Brunch Ever
For Workers everywhere, bricks, straw, verse.
The breast naturally of Woman is bread before
there was bread, the child the loaf swelling in
Her arms to farm & from such frame a world.
Thus Labor. Bread is History.
Child's toil, unspoiled, forms a culture beast,
he crawls forth, makes bread of soil native &
other, a Mother culture all & still, everywhere.
- Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, from 'Immigrants Exile, Labor, Drive Or Will, And The Lady Mother - A Malafiction'
1
History before was brunch ever in the world.
Sunday. St. Marks & 1st Avenue. Red, red Simone,
doors open to sun and saunter, the wander, now
'arm in arm they goes' just past the corner where
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Living Off The Grid
Living off the grid in the interstices between the threads
of the spider webs bejewelling the sky with stars
like the net of Indra in the morning dew. Mark one dropp
and they're all marked. Subtract from one
and you take from all. Same way with our eyes
when they see like crystal skulls right through
the ruse of themselves to the glassblowers
of fifteenth century Germany. Cool visuals.
The light refracting off the nuanced smear
above their left front parietal lobes as if
they had something as happy and irrational as water
to be clear about in a brittle kind of way.
And that's ok, that's ok, that's ok, too,
but you've got to get down and dirty in the starmud
like the root of an optic nerve deep in the dark matter of the brain,
if you want to be what you see in the visionary sense of the word.
If you want to fly with the dragons that bring the rain
you can't sip like a hummingbird collecting blood samples
from the hollyhocks. You can't live like a tuning fork
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poem by Patrick White
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The Shambling Fellow
I neither smoke nor drink sippingly,
Nor eat sweeping essence of flowering puppies,
Nor ever tasted the potion of hemp green,
Nor I have cancerous tumors in the brain.
I was thrown from the lofty zones,
Down deep headlong into the dungeon,
Dark narrow subterranean round cave,
Darker it grew at each moment of the down fall,
And journeying against the culminating heights.
Beholding behind nothing except horror I felt,
Only I could see a circular patch of the blue sky,
Then the dark channel began tuning at last,
To the right with imperceptible slow bend,
And I soon came out gasping of the deep tunnel.
In front then I saw the houses small and white,
Painted not afresh, extended left and right,
Numerous congested like a city inhabited thickly,
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poem by Muhammad Shanazar
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Twenty Years On
I am young so fast so free so young
for so many many years young endless
eternally young never aging living
so fast time stood still in sky motionless.
I thought that I was young.
I thought my teenage years
were still enduring within me.
As indeed they fever pitch were.
For I was still in my psyche somehow;
absolute emotive adventuring teenager.
To enduring perpetual defining depths;
exhilarating a youthful passionate heart.
I thought that I was young.
I thought my teenage years
were still infusing youthful metabolism.
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poem by Terence George Craddock
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