Category: Music

“His Elderly Father as a Young Man” by Leo Dangel

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry

This happened before I met your mother:
I took Jennie Johanson to a summer dance,
and she sent me a letter, a love letter,
I guess, even if the word love wasn’t in it.
She wrote that she had a good time
and didn’t want the night to end.
At home, she lay down on her bed
but stayed awake, listening to the songs
of morning birds outside her window.
I read that letter a hundred times
and kept it in a cigar box
with useless things I had saved:
a pocket knife with an imitation pearl handle
and a broken blade,
a harmonica I never learned to play,
one cuff link, an empty rifle shell.

When your mother and I got married,
I threw the letter away –
if I had kept it, she might wonder.
But I wanted to keep it
and even thought about hiding places,
maybe in the barn or the tool shed,
but what if it were ever found?
I knew of no way to explain why
I would keep such a letter, much less
why I would take the trouble to hide it.

“His Elderly Father as a Young Man” by Leo Dangel, from Home from the Field. © Spoon River Poetry Press, 1997.

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“Old Man” by Neil Young

“Memoriam” by Anne Michaels

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry

In lawnchairs under stars. On the dock
at midnight, anchored by winter clothes,
we lean back to read the sky. Your face white
in the womb light, the lake’s electric skin.

Driving home from Lewiston, full and blue, the moon
over one shoulder of highway. There,
or in your kitchen at midnight, sitting anywhere
in the seeping dark, we bury them again and
again under the same luminous thumbprint.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.

Their stones are salt and mark where we look back.
Your mother’s hand at the end of an empty sleeve,
scratching at your palm, drawing blood.
Your aunt in a Jewish graveyard in Poland,
her face a permanent fist of pain.
Your first friend, Saul, who died faster than
you could say forgive me.
When I was nine and crying from a dream
you said words that hid my fear.
Above us the family slept on,
mouths open, hands scrolled.
Twenty years later your tears burn the back of my throat.
Memory has a hand in the grave up to the wrist.
Earth crumbles from your fist under the sky’s black sieve.
We are orphaned, one by one.

On the beach at Superior, you found me
where I’d been for hours, cut by the lake’s sharp rim.
You stopped a dozen feet from me.
What passed in that quiet said:
I have nothing to give you.

At dusk, birch forest is a shore of bones.
I’ve pulled stones from the earth’s black pockets,
felt the weight of their weariness – worn,
exhausted from their sleep in the earth.
I’ve written on my skin with their black sweat.

The lake’s slight movement is stilled by fading light.
Soon the stars’ tiny mouths, the moon’s blue mouth.

I have nothing to give you, nothing to carry,
some words to make me less afraid, to say
you gave me this.
Memory insists with its sea voice,
muttering from its bone cave.
Memory wraps us
like the shell wraps the sea.
Nothing to carry,
some stones to fill our pockets,
to give weight to what we have.

Anne Michaels, The Weight of Oranges. Miner’s Pond. McClelland & Stewart (1997)

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“Fear” by Sarah McLachlan

“The Scientist Talks Love” by Jessica Therese

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry1 Comment

A scientist equates love to a chemical imbalance
in the brain which releases serotonin.

A zoologist states it’s otters, cradling the smoothest
stone in their pouch, holding hands to stop them
from drifting apart while they sleep.

A musician plays it off as the silence between
the last crotchet held by the orchestra and the rupture
of applause from the audience.

A electrician declares it’s crackling sparks
in reach like miniature fireworks.
It’s sliding a fork into a toaster without a fatality.

A poet writes that love is always fatal.

An astronomer proposes it is the night, the current,
and the stars competing for his attention: who won?
The stars, the stars, the stars.

An explorer claims it’s reinventing the atlas.
It is how the continents can’t stop steering away
from one another.

A magician whispers love is trickery.
It’s fooling the spectators into believing all of this is real.

My mother softly says the red spots we see
when we close our eyes are guardian ghosts
trying to leave us messages. “That is love.”

A blind man murmurs it’s recognising
someone just by touch alone.

An artist says nothing, but flings
yellow paint at the canvas.

A child exclaims love is fairy floss
stuck between her back molars.

An ambulance driver believes love
is making it in time.

I believe love is the way the sun
continues to blare down on us so ashamedly,
even when our eyes strain
to look at it.

– Jessica Therese, “The Scientist Talks Love”

 

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“What’s Love Got to Do With It?” by Tina Turner (unplugged)

“He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely… (Duras)

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Quote

“He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.”

– Marguerite Duras, The Lover

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“I Can’t Tell You Why” by the Eagles

“Laugh Lines” by Trista Mateer

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry

I am always moving towards you.

On my bad days, I say to myself: ‘then you.’
Sure, this now. But then you.

I will keep tossing myself life lines.
I will keep writing myself afloat
until I don’t have to write a poem for every mile marker
from here to California.

You and I together is the most foolish thing
I’ve ever hoped for. You and I apart is more foolish.

When I can’t sleep at night, I dream up
conversations with you. I never call. I never push.
I try not to whine. I just write it all down.

Sometimes I want to apologize for wanting you out loud,
like too many people know the reasons
I am going to have laugh lines.

Sometimes instead of distanced pillow talk,
I want to curl up with the phone
and read you poetry.

Instead, we just talk about it.

You say, ‘Honey, how was your day?’
And I say, “Today I wrote another poem
about your coffee cup mouth
and all the ways you still keep me up at night.’

I hear a sigh in your smile.
You make a sound that reminds me of
fighting with my bags at the airport;
but you’re still too far away.

– Trista Mateer, ”Laugh Lines”

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“To A Poet” by First Aid Kit