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phineasjonesi just typed up the poems that make up the texts of the duets anney and i are singing this sunday. and so i'll put them here, for the curious. four poems by katha pollitt.
Metaphors of Women by Elliot Z. Levine
Four duets on poems of Katha Pollitt
Metaphors of Women
What if the moon
was never a beautiful woman?
Call it a shark shearing across black water.
An ear. A drum in the desert.
A window. A bone shoe.
What if the sea
was discovered to have no womb?
Let it be clouds, blue as the day they were born.
A ceremony of bells and questions.
A toothache. A lost twin.
What if a woman
is not the moon or the sea?
Say map of the air. Say green parabola.
Lichen and the stone that feeds it.
No rain. Rain.
Moon and Flowering Plum
A huge moon rises behind the branches
stippled with white plum flowers, cold and frail,
like snow in early spring. Suddenly
it is that moment you have longed for,
you overflowing like a cup,
like the moon overflowing with whiteness.
Could you live like that,
moving from incandescence to incandescence
as courtly viewers of plum flowers
proceed from one white orchard to the next?
Or would you find
their formal robes too stiff, the moon too slow,
the orchards, when you reached them,
muddy and full of frogs.
Intimation
It says what you’ve always known
even as a child
when your grandmother sat on your bed in the dark
and sang that tuneless song
about a white goat and raisins and almonds
and you felt suddenly strange:
as though you had waked in the night and snow was falling.
Lives of the Nineteenth Century Poetesses
As girls, they were awkward and peculiar,
wept in church or refused to go at all.
Their mothers saw right away no man would marry them.
So they must live at the sufferance of others,
timid and queer as governesses out of Chekov,
malnourished on theology, boiled eggs and tea,
but given to outbursts of pride that embarrass everyone.
After the final quarrel, the grand
renunciation, they retire upstairs to the attic
or to the small room in the cheap off-season hotel
and write today I burned all your letters or
I dreamed the magnolia blazed like an avenging angel
and when I woke I knew I was in Hell. No one is surprised when they die young,
having left all their savings to a wastrel nephew
to be remembered for a handful
of "minor but perfect" lyrics
a passion for jam or charades
and a letter still preserved in the family archives:
"I send you herewith the papers of your aunt
who died last Tuesday in the odor of sanctity
although a little troubled in her mind
by her habit, much disapproved of by the ignorant
of writing down the secrets of her heart."
oh hey, if you read those and see any typos, let me know?
Metaphors of Women by Elliot Z. Levine
Four duets on poems of Katha Pollitt
Metaphors of Women
What if the moon
was never a beautiful woman?
Call it a shark shearing across black water.
An ear. A drum in the desert.
A window. A bone shoe.
What if the sea
was discovered to have no womb?
Let it be clouds, blue as the day they were born.
A ceremony of bells and questions.
A toothache. A lost twin.
What if a woman
is not the moon or the sea?
Say map of the air. Say green parabola.
Lichen and the stone that feeds it.
No rain. Rain.
Moon and Flowering Plum
A huge moon rises behind the branches
stippled with white plum flowers, cold and frail,
like snow in early spring. Suddenly
it is that moment you have longed for,
you overflowing like a cup,
like the moon overflowing with whiteness.
Could you live like that,
moving from incandescence to incandescence
as courtly viewers of plum flowers
proceed from one white orchard to the next?
Or would you find
their formal robes too stiff, the moon too slow,
the orchards, when you reached them,
muddy and full of frogs.
Intimation
It says what you’ve always known
even as a child
when your grandmother sat on your bed in the dark
and sang that tuneless song
about a white goat and raisins and almonds
and you felt suddenly strange:
as though you had waked in the night and snow was falling.
Lives of the Nineteenth Century Poetesses
As girls, they were awkward and peculiar,
wept in church or refused to go at all.
Their mothers saw right away no man would marry them.
So they must live at the sufferance of others,
timid and queer as governesses out of Chekov,
malnourished on theology, boiled eggs and tea,
but given to outbursts of pride that embarrass everyone.
After the final quarrel, the grand
renunciation, they retire upstairs to the attic
or to the small room in the cheap off-season hotel
and write today I burned all your letters or
I dreamed the magnolia blazed like an avenging angel
and when I woke I knew I was in Hell. No one is surprised when they die young,
having left all their savings to a wastrel nephew
to be remembered for a handful
of "minor but perfect" lyrics
a passion for jam or charades
and a letter still preserved in the family archives:
"I send you herewith the papers of your aunt
who died last Tuesday in the odor of sanctity
although a little troubled in her mind
by her habit, much disapproved of by the ignorant
of writing down the secrets of her heart."
oh hey, if you read those and see any typos, let me know?
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-21 02:31 pm (UTC)typo-wise: overflow[ing] with whiteness
should "full of frogs" have a ?
the articles "or" and "and" might not need to be italicized in the "emotionlessly" part of Poetesses.
wow. these are great poems.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-21 02:51 pm (UTC)did you get my phone message? my questions are these:
i have raisins and almonds! so... should it be a preluse? should it be the offertory? both? should we sing it as a prelude and have george play it as the offertory (to be followed by intimation)?
another factor - i have it in d minor and when it's quoted in the duets, it's in c minor. it would be nice to have it in that same key, no? so... if we transpose, it gets a little low (to a b flat and lower if we were to sing some harmony... though i suppose we could move that around).
so... i just don't know. what were you thinking about us singing v. george playing?