Скачать или смотреть Spectrophonic Personae-1996-4 A Pretty Girl is Like a Klangfarbenmelodie

Poem for violin, viola, piano, (one performer) and electronics.

A Pretty Girl Is Like a Klangfarbenmelodie

To be strong in submission is to be more and less than, say,
Yeats' Anne Gregory admiring her yellow hair in the mirror (with God)
Loving it and hating it.

Do not argue for peace, but remember Leonardo's mother
Smiling silly through the Virgin Mary,
Or the syphilitic syren grinning in the doorway
Of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus.
Feel deeply what your argument cannot reach
And you will be safe enough.

My first wife was an opera singer. She had a very high coloratura
voice, which ruined all my choral music for over ten years.
I could not love a text without remembering her.
Personally, I can't keep a good memory under about 12,000 Hz.

To be strong in conception is to know what it is possible to know
Without knowing anything.

The poet observes the picture of his brown-eyed girl misting in his mind.
The poet, turbulent seer, knows the brown-eyed cyclone for herself alone,
And cannot see in her narrowing pupils anything
but what they have agreed upon-
What they already agreed on before the world was made,
and unmade them both together.
I say "unmade" because DNA played the same trick on them
That it does on all the weary circling spirits seeking to remember
What they knew
before they became dust.
They forgot just like we all forgot,
And they were so sure they wouldn't forget,
The angels had to smile.

To be strong in submission is to be lost in the will of the wave.
I love it all, the shifting, sifting brown, as we splash above the foam
for a moment,
Breathe in the light of Catalina, and drop down again into the sea,
And remember and are lost.

I even let her have the last word-
After all, a pretty girl is like a klangfarbenmelodie.

© 1998 Richard Freeman-Toole