(1)
The slow spirit,
at ease in time,
follows in heart -
beat much at ease.
Walking motion:
indigo pace
in cantata
step, careful, forth.
Three ways to live -
fantasy and wit
timpani strings
or minuet.
Stately, with much
life. Like Heep, false
but humble, six notes
vivid larks rising.
(2) Where Herr Eulenspiegel is seconded to salve the wounds of fate...
Vigour in drabs,
revolution
approaches;
dramma giocoso.
Our Larghetto,
riding the taste
of dawn from sleep,
together; wrought.
Choirs of wind
refuse to bow
before heart-beats
writ by Malzel;
century-half
bar coda, much
the same in force.
Unleashed; ardour.
(3) Man of a Great Memory A song pain after the holocaust...Leonard Bernstein
E Flat. E Flat.
Nothing like this:
Dissonance, to
vision 'cross space.
The funeral,
its threnody,
"Enough, as is
needed" to wound.
Yet, in trio
youth in scherzo
live softly, in
memory's bridge.
A remote key,
gesture as chord.
A victory?
Provisional.
(4) The Gamesome Timpano
Walking on air,
ascend toward light;
bright lovely fire
crafted into seas.
Stillness, motion
interplay calm -
'rock and lighthouse'
set the table.
The private home
of the Prince, where
the orchestra
opened this trove
in the Ides night,
drum-led:
Pianissimo,
civilization.
(5) The Gods Held Their Breath on 22 Dec 1808
One two three four;
one two three four.
Can a moment
hold tomorrow
in its chord-like
fingers? Major
here, minor there.
Goethe thought it
a threat; Hector
saw the gaze of
Mesmer. The odd
old man who birth'd
it only said:
indeed, better
noise at that. Well.
(7) The Untranslatable Dance (in 92 steps)
Ripe for the mad-house Carl Maria von Weber
The apotheosis of dance Richard Wagner
Our rhythmic life
simply is. This,
its laurel, echoes:
Worthy madness.
Spiritually
drunk with music
notes casked over time
to create life.
Intoxicant
dimensions, lay
forth across Gods
Presto! a’bless.
Barbaric yawps
of fanfare surge.
Roofs sound 'cross time
and leave whole.
(6a) Awakening It is more profitable to watch the sun rise. Claude Debussy
The dark and wet
part, allowing
passage to light.
Her sobs still flirt
as you call out,
leafless, held high.
Books and clocks bloom
by the window
speeding past all
landscape. Alone,
you swim undone,
in prayer for hands
to join the bract
shimmering full,
up and down arms
grown in country.
(6b) By the brook
Cadenza writ
by eyes aglow
in separate
weeping brooks; cleft
mythology
preface to their
unashamed fall.
Tongues in bird-song
lament: Cuckoo
gossip, Quail quotes,
Nightingale smile.
Paths of meadows
form a quartet,
where consciousness
chimes across unwary
landscape wrote still.
(6c) Merriment
Toes and fingers
comb the red grass,
pizzicato
water colour.
Toil forgot, hid
in solitude,
unimportance
exulting, peace.
Bella luna,
soto voce.
Take my whispers
in this acreage
and plant them past
Wordsworth's oboe:
We are emblem,
distant, in cheer.
(6d) Sturm The goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely. E.M. Forester, Howard's End
Fortissimo.
The grim door knock,
iron on elm-girt,
before night falls
to murmuring
for innocence
before judgment
wrought on sharp rock.
The somnolent
call of thunder
pulls cloth from flesh;
storm-light in waltz
time laughs over shame
unhidden, bare.
Bass and cello
drowse the rain's chord.
(6e) Hymn More the expression of feeling than painting. Ludwig van Beethoven
It always ends
as quickly come,
a grey child
amid blooms of sky.
Moderately
we collect nerve
and shaken words
from all the dust
now shepherding
the thankful wind.
Unforsaken
in history's
catcall, we weep
in effort, down
on bended knee,
God head heard.
(8) Dramatic Comedy, Excused from the Table
Our vivace
- e con brio -
entwine in wit
and elegance,
gilded flesh one.
Like a time piece
wound in some throb,
we craft and beat,
plain-spoken. Then,
centuries ago,
the minuet
pulsed a clock-work.
Now, our rondo
and sonata
mix, force majeure,
the end beguine.
(9a) Meaning May he steal away weeping from this company. Schiller, An die Freude
The howl of time
fathers the sun
in its tragic
devotional.
Daylight speeds age
from the grunt of
apes to the still
where quill meets pulp.
Catcalls and bray,
philosophe and
spasmodic ire,
these distant worlds
traverse the rays,
casting shadow
upon the lime
dial of cold time.
(9b) Imagining
Though now coloured
in orange work,
your mind scarcely
can be blamed
for bowing low
to the commands
of this fugue state.
We can forgive
feeling childhood
freeze in small parts,
cleaved by scherzo
into tiny
bits of shining
purple marble.
What is now round
was once only whole.
(9c) Feeling
There is no rest
in B Flat, no
passage to sky.
Father's spirit
holds you aloft,
transcribed notes of
melancholy
and choral pause.
Variations
blink in seasons;
the country dance
revolves in breasts.
Your moonlight rains
over all mankind,
nakedness free,
lonely exult'd.
(9d) Singing
Lovely sparks, sounds
reunite fire.
Heaven's charms march
across plains of
jubilation.
More joyful kisses
could not bloom a
rose; to drink joy
is to sense Him,
a gentle wing
a canopy
of stars and spells.
No sonata
blooms such an ode;
we sing, frenzied
upon the wall.
Seventy Octobers
to DSCH...
I - Lament for a dead infant
In the sepia glow of hope,
we try to forgive the newborn
for one day knowing they will expire,
reminding us how fertile the dust is
that runs like cycles of the moon
beneath our quivering skin,
a malformed secret we keep from babies
lest they choose to disappear before they wake.
II - Fussy Mummy & Auntie
Fuss and fiddle, this cowlicked, unparted hair,
it’s pictures today, everyone will make fun;
tuss and tangle, your freshly rumpled suit,
it’s church tomorrow, God will know you’re not freshly pressed;
bubble and squeak, the pepper in such mean boyishness,
it’s girls who cry in the playground, shameful dancing like that;
roil and rubble, our good names ruined,
it’s all those damned books, cleaving a river between us.
III - Lullaby
We tell ourselves, sing babies to sleep, caress them.
Buy flowers, say we love someone, or candy
to sweeten the pebbles rolling up the path.
It’s all indignity to want the candy store
or the garden or the bakery or the toy shop
just to smell like we’re still breathing.
We make a hobby out of sketching lieder,
to make believe our psyche won’t feel autumn,
to ignore the winter scribbled in our margins.
IV - Before a Long Separation
This lifetime of wander, thinking,
in some queer moment,
an embarrassing sleep will emerge.
No plant or animal or fish knows such,
whether they profit, unclear.
Dressing for work appears
existentially redundant, eating, sex
other than liking the taste of it,
trying to answer questions tired
wonder gets that no one asked.
All the world, crowded, badly ventilated
and we’re already bound, not speaking
from matrices of doubt
all nature has forgotten doesn’t exist.
V - A Warning
If ever an augury had graced the sky, it was some time ago.
The rest is just good manners, as the clock finds midnight
and we realize whole atlases had been inside our eyes
as we travel by now through ourselves, on the way
to a terminus we never really left in the first place.
Mothers, they knew this chime all along.
VI - The Deserted Father
The warm hand that squeezes a boy’s
shoulder never landed, the idea of it
a pilgrimage whose stomach growls.
Too much grey biography -
a manhood, a birthright, even -
seems mislaid in baggage no one
can find on the accepted blueprints.
No tears follow. Old age got to them.
VII - A Song of Poverty
The radish and onion grill our character
but is less than a withered grain of rice.
A dead cell phone cries out in tongues
but is a chorus compared to a throat’s crackle.
The traffic – the horror!
but a sniffle in a buffet of malady.
Every landscape is a masquerade, only
a burial ground truly recognize the days.
VIII - Winter
The dust of last season’s grass, tidied in frost
and yellow, unknowing mud frozen into place
as corners of forgotten leaves glisten across
the swirl of ghostly snow, breathing
with diamond finality our shared epoch,
the sleep of our remarkable compassion.
IX - The Good Life
The imprisoned revolutionaries toil in the kitchens
to feed victorious guests clamoring in the doorway.
The diseased build and rebuild the same palace, carving
over-sized furniture from the very churches that lock them out.
The useless, near extinct animals form a galloping choir
harvested to perform Wagner, poolside nightly.
Whole oceans turned brown are siphoned into canteens
owned by the lovely and the landed, as if by law, if not destiny.
X - A Girl’s Song
In a crystal parfait of jewels, a woman sparkles,
a golden nectar schooling verse
in a synthesis of every gender, where pleasure -
the irreversible binomial of all eventide
in an earth where symbiotics blend space and time.
XI - Happiness
There's a special desk at the State Office
of Dead Letters just for me.
In my postal egotism I keep writing, on tenterhooks
I'll one day answer myself by mistake.
But in the Ides night, an anniversary letter arrived
that sealed my imaginings with its tang.
To this I'm required new-fangled postage,
perhaps even a new domicile so that I'm sure
to receive seventy eras of new correspondence
following me, from compassion through liberation.
Adam Henry Carrière is a poet, teacher, and broadcaster who has crashed five states, committed radio in three, frolicked in some fifteen countries, and even played on three Navy ships before Rummy got wise. Recent publications include The Smoking Book, The Mayo Review, Tonopah Review, Juked (2008 Poetry Prize Finalist), Zygote in My Coffee,Oak Bend Review, Tattoo Highway, and The Bug Book, upcoming from Poets Wear Prada Press.
Born on the South Side of Chicago, Adam now resides in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he has personally bankrolled the renovation and/or expansion of at least four neighborhood casinos, won the 2006 Nevada Arts Council Literary Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and publishes Danse Macabre, Nevada’s first online literary magazine. He has also presented a wide range of papers at the Far West Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association’s annual Conference, and serves on the Editorial Board of Popular Culture Review.
Working on a doctorate (or, working on not being further impoverished by said pursuit) has not dislodged the guilty pleasures of Ian Fleming, bella musica Wien, and Britain’s Hammer Films. His favorite poets are Hughes, Szymborska, and Mozart. Particularly, he aspires to follow on the imaginative trail blazed by the feuilleton of Joseph Roth.
