The Music of Words — October 2018 by Carol Bjorlie “The Poet behind the cello”

I don’t know which I love more: words or music.  I have played the ‘cello since I was 10 years old.  A LONG time.  I write poetry about music.  I collect poetry about music.  I love to read aloud. I believe in wordplay.  Here’s a poem about sound:

The Moon

lasted all night and seemed to burn

toward noon

after just that brief blue darkness

nightfall bound by worlds.

And we turn to that rising

again & again

we turn and like stars, like debutantes 

like false teeth

we come out.

How would we know

blinded by words

as we are

the blood guess of morning on the rocks

how it dawns on the gulls

creak of their throats against salt wind.

One of my favorite books on music, Mixed Voices Contemporary Poems about Music, edited by Emilie Buchwald and Ruth Roston has 184 pages of musical poems.  Here are a few

“To Play Pianissimo”  by Lola Haskins

Does not mean silence.

The absence of the moon in the day sky

for example.

Does not mean barely to speak,

the way a child’s whisper

makes only warm air 

on his mother’s right ear.

To play pianissimo

is to carry sweet words

to the old woman in the last dark row

who cannot hear anything else,

and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.

 

“Instructions to the Player”  by Carl Rakosi

Cellist,

easy on that bow.

Not too much weeping.

Remember  that the should

is easily agitated

and has a terror of shapelessness.

It will venture out

inner mysterioso

but from a distance 

like the forest at night.

And do not forget

the phase between.

That is the sweetest

and has the nature of infinity.

“Saxophone Julie”  by Susan Firer

The one that works Holly hock Alley,

she blows sunflowers and pumpkins,

moons, stars and tinseled potatoes

blow out her saxophone’s bell.

She rolls down her socks:

blue balloons in red geraniums,

sticks out her stomach, plays 

the black inside black-eyed Susans,

and the music is like the plastic door

put in the side of the cow a the state 

Fair.  The music lets you look inside her.

Oh, Sandman, it’s dirty in there 

like barns

something’s happen in there

like lovers leaves in their hair.

It’s hot and wet: a whirlpool, maybe 

a summer night’s shower.

Oh, Julie , play the rainbow of death again;

let me swallow every color like a flame eater,

let the musical grace fall down on me

encircle my breath beautifully as the green bands

around a ring-neck pheasant’s throat.

Gas  by Gerry Gordon (after John Coltrane)

Riding high into the night

on John’s Good Gas we shot thru

Ravenna and Rootstown and Shalers-

ville digging on Pablo Cruise & 

Bob Seeger, &  the heavy night but

when Trane came thick on tenor

Something snapped, she shifted

Into low in that unknown home

Where the wind peeled our

Heart open to the bone

Rita Dove’s book, Sonata Mullatica includes poems about Mozart and Beethoven. The one I will include is titled  LINES WHISPERED TO A PILLOW (Staff Quarters, Esterhazy Estate)

Little monkey, little cow,

Can you hear me listening? Now:

Ticking clock, piano plink _

Watch me hear you, feel me think.  

 

Sharon Chmielarz, a Minnesota poet put together The Other Mozart One poem included in that book is “A Blue Note” 

The success of other women musicians:

Regina Strinaschcchi, Nancy Storace.  The established 

Josepha von Auernhammer, Maria Teresia von Paradis,

Even Constanze Weber, that two-bit squeaking

field mouse procured a solo at St. Peter’s.

Only because of Wolfgang! The list lengthens,

a struggle against envy.  Therese Friberth.

Gretl Marchand, her latest three sonatas.

Carnival has been a fairyland of awards for her – 

a shower of earrings, pendants, pearls, bracelets,

Count von Seeau’s gifts to the brilliant sixteen-year-old

who is so at home with the new pianoforte.

”You’d like the touch, Nannerl,” she writes,

“It’s so easy to play.  I could show you how in a minute.”

Even I have a book of poems about music, titled, Behind The Cello.  I include two:

Creative Protest

Albert Schweitzer leaned close to his friend and said, 

“It is better to create than to protest.”

Pablo Casals responded,

“Why not do both, create and protest?”

Imagine those two in Zurich, 1951,

standing in the cold in their overcoats and respectable hats,

shaking hands, cutting to the chase.

They know about time,

how much there has been;

how little has been learned.

 

And for my nephew, a bass player, I wrote

Bass  (for Mike Pearce)

This wood sounds like a tree knows it sounds,

the trunk proud to be chose,

tortured; reactivated

into a brown shell,

alive,

grooving.

Y’all stay happy now.        Carol

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