I WHO HAVE SPOKEN THE WORLD, AN ORATORIO

Transcription

1 ART, Douglas Leichter, AN ORATORIO Poems by Paul Pines Musical Settings by Catherine Reid 1

2 CONTENTS: 1. LAST CALL AT THE TIN PALACE 2. LARGO 3. THE VEDAS IS NOW REVEALED TO THEE 4. DIVINE MADNESS # 24 The dead 5. THE UPANISHADS SAY 6. DIVINE MADNESS #47 I who have spoken the world 2

3 1) LAST CALL AT THE TIN PALACE Granada falling at my feet a Mayan princeling in the service of his conquerors or the buried time between time before I was young when I saw my life to come what it held in store and decided I would live... whoever I was in other lives it doesn't matter to me now as it does to Nat in the kitchen placing layer on layer of paper thin dough to make his spinach pies that he was once a woman and way back an apprentice to a scribe sanding down stones or to Jim closing down the bar that as a Nez Perce he watched his people dying in the Montana snow and that he was in tears He says his name was Looking Glass that he knows where he was born 3

4 (LAST CALL, Cont.) and where he's buried says he's stood and said a prayer before his own grave 4

5 2) LARGO Maybe in the end it s not the poet who wins but the one who wanted to be a poet because the will is not a beacon but a match struck in the wind and all we teach each other or are taught begins and ends as soon as it is thought and every passion leads us from a known thing back into a deep unknown 5

6 3) THE VEDAS IS NOW REVEALED TO THEE Sankara Monsters are born in the dark and come to light they exist to show you the shape of your fear which you begin to see is the door to your heart that you have located in despair but enter in sadness... a wave that carries you away from old wounds 6

7 4) DIVINE MADNESS # 24 The dead will not forgive those who fail to mark their passing or bury their remains The dead will not forgive those who pass through their rooms in silence noting blue squill in April on the lawns of their abandoned houses Nothing is worse than their anger not the curse of a brother indifference of a daughter The dead will not forgive those who abandon their children the sadness of a son riding his bike through the autumnal streets of a paper-mill town white smoke billowing from stacks along the river where his father once worked the line 7

8 5) THE UPANISHADS SAY The Upanishads say at the moment of death our breath breaks up into particles of light and gathering all that we are descends into the heart where it illuminates what had been in the dark until trailing light and life we are sucked into a wheeling hub of air and sun beyond a drum-like rift in the moon to a place free of snow If I could take with me those I love my broad-cheeked wife our daughter whose chin fits my palm into god's body through a hole in my heart... I'd wrap them both in glowing particles of breath funnel up to a place without 8

9 grief and snow as much of them as shared my time before I fell or falling rose I would take those I love with me yet leave them to compose their lives the way I tried as a child by an act of concentration to make a hole in time through which the man I would become might reach back to touch his father s son 9

10 6) DIVINE MADNESS #47 I who have spoken the world Find myself with no one To talk to I who have loved the particulars Of various landscapes find myself At home in no place History vanishes All around me children are taught The dead have nothing to tell them Even as the dead whisper Eternal secrets in the nautilus Of their ears 10