1. |
Rail Music
08:41
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Rail Music
You can hear it from a long way off
Coming down the pass
Horn echoing off the mountainside
And the love you had
You let it go
It slips away
Bonds all cut
And there it is:
Barrier between worlds:
Billions wandering the other side
Are they all ghosts?
Are you the ghost?
How can we know?
We’re standing in the station
Looking down at the crowd on the platform
We can stare all we like
Look down the tracks
We still won’t know when it comes
Until
WHOOSH (blow on the mic)
You wake up
Find yourself on a train
No memory of how you got on
No knowledge of where you’re going
And the headlight’s on
And the clouds are thudding across the sky in the dark
And the silver of the rails
It’s like the moon thrown across dark water
More clouds than the single headlight of the moon can unravel
And on this train we may not ever know all the stops
Or even the places we’ve been
And there will be no one
No conductor to tell us whether we only have seconds left
Or whether it’s hardly begun
I know who you are
Seen you before
Just a flash, something I saw in a window
Face on the subway
Gone so fast
****
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2. |
Incantation
07:57
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This is the incantation that rings in the halls of the homeless
Rains down on subway platforms in the dead of winter
Empties into the river and is gone.
The snow last night has buried every one of us
We look up from the hollows where we live
And there on the snowy rooftop
sits the stone Buddha with his eyes downcast
chanting the names of the fallen and the still to fall
Syllables never catch up to the birthrate now.
We are just too many. And born too fast.
sarah and will and james and dina and ian and john and eric
and marie douce and liz and will and sarah and john Michael
and dina and tadhg and james kelly and marie douce, michael
and will and bryan and pierre, raymond and jacques eric and liz
and marie douce
and on and on and on and on
names they tumble, whirling past the streetlights in the night
So many fall. We need more buddhas
to be calling, calling
calling all the wild corners of winter
fall down on your knees
We are the fallen who walk in the halls of the homeless
chanting the names of the present into the past,
like snow melting into the river
the past forgotten as the moment becomes.
This is the incantation that swells in the halls of the homeless
Rains down on subway platforms in the dead of winter
melts into the river and is gone.
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3. |
Perseids (live)
07:15
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Perseids
As I write this we are in the midst
of the Perseid meteor shower,
comet Swift-Tuttle streaking into our atmosphere.
Its orbit intersects ours in August each year
Its orbit strewn with debris broken from the main body.
And the place it intersects our orbit?
We call that August.
Each piece of debris that touches our atmosphere burns.
And every 133 years the comet itself streaks into our lives.
In 1992 the last time
Then 2126
But this time it will come a few thousand miles from here
Big enough to take out life on this planet
And you and I, we’re circling each other now.
In orbits 5000 kilometers apart
What happens when we touch again?
What kind of debris rains down?
I am feeling the fire of your touch on my body,
the touches of you in my life,
multiple images I have of you,
how from out of nowhere you appear
so ferociously beautiful.
Each of those little streaks is a mark you’ve made on me,
and on this day they are everywhere,
sixty or seventy per hour,
from all parts of the sky
streak into our atmosphere
touching me,
changing me,
burned into my life.
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4. |
Dark Skies
03:01
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5. |
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She is kind enough when she needs me.
The life she struggles to maintain
more precious to her than mine,
even on the night I was born.
Yet I am still her daughter, do what I can.
It is only a month, only a week,
only one more weekend till
I set out for still waters.
But then a year’s gone by,
and were it not for what I make
I would not survive. It would all be way too dark,
and friends too faraway, and I would feel torn in two
with desire to run, obligation to stay.
And still waters would be an illusion, receding,
down past the end of the driveway,
past the self-same houses of suburban somewhere hell.
And so I have set out for still waters,
waters so calm and deep they mediate
the anguish and the rage, the oil on water on the boil. Beyond
the love and rage of a broken marriage
how is it I am so alive?
When I arrive at still waters the jumble of my life
will fold into water and water fold into itself, and slowly, slowly
motion will halt, and only the ripple
of thought will well up from the depths:
Silence without, meet silence within.
Now I am at still waters
and hauling rocks I work my arms and shoulders
till the muscles twine like cables cross my neck.
Even at still waters the wind kicks up in the aspens
and the soil’s half frozen in winter. And there are still rocks to move,
and the moss garden is an old fool’s beard, tossed snow white and disordered.
The wind chimes in the garden ring the windy hours twelve by twelve..
Chalky winter sun meshed in bare branches. Alone at still waters
I see that star still burning in the southern sky,
care less and less how men have come and gone.
Nothing is as it should be, except, strangely, me.
Soon I will leave still waters, wander north into the world of snow
And when we merge the two—my spinning world and his the whirling one—
gold sparks will crackle where the two wheels touch, where our heels kick up
Now the wheeling world drops seasons in its wake, turns gold into straw,
pulls water to itself. And from this whorl of life the branches toss up
leaves at every turn, and every one attentive to our
little yellow ever-burning star.
And out of these days in motion I feel my muscles stretch against
A lifetime wound so tightly around me
it’s a fabric, a sari, binding me to all I know and all I’ve seen. .
I weave the fabric into straw,
stilling my thoughts, blessing myself and the spirit from whence I came.
And he, what does he feel?
the one who wrote these words?
It’s not so faraway, his land of frozen water.
His thoughts go quiet at my touch. It takes such heat when ice melts into water.
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Ian Ferrier / Louise Campbell Montreal, Québec
Ian Ferrier and Louise Campbell have been improvising and performing together for the last six years. Ian is a well-known
poet, performer and musician; Louise is a musician, composer and improviser.
Dark Sky Preserve is also a book from Clay Grouse Press. It includes the poetry, prose and musical scores for this work.
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