5.The Terror - Duncan McGibbon (book club books txt) 📗

/> she stipulates this still reform of emptiness.

An intimate, she answers to the specious nude
with coherent nakedness.
Her person precisions a stippled space
to carry friendship on the stance

of an ice-field made huge
and simple
with her human
articulation.

2. Free Part

(

To Sean Smith and the musicians of the Fleadh Ceoil, August 1979,
Listowel)

Poirt Dubalta

The skirling drones
the uilléan intones,
the edge of the flute
and the bodhrán mute
lift to savour
the air’s flavour.
Grief’s the burden
of the stepping men.
Pain, the song
of hungering long.
The fiddle’s scuff
on the surface rough
sounds in the air,
my loved-one’s quair.


Poirt Sigil

Unsaid presence,
stating absence
is music’s sap,
arcing the gap
between this flight
and past blight.
Now the tripping
fields are stippling
joy and fear
in one span clear.


3. Poirt Luascaigh

Owl and lark
fear the dark.
It must so.
Each furlough
has its ghosts,
whose dread hosts
haunt worker
and shirker.
Hounds will bay
dawn of day.
Hounds will bark,
hollowing dark.

The stone
alone
attests
these deaths.
The blade
is played
to waste
the place,
a wand
now fond,
the word
unheard.
The dance
a stance
laid down
on sound.


3. Middle Entry

( To Lakshmi Shankar Raga, Maiha Garana, March 28th 1980)

1. Alaap.

Túmri rhythms
quake with a dread
lightness and the room
is stilled.
Shabdabrahman,
swaps the cosmos
for sound.
Nada Brahma,
this cosmos now.
The wiring relaxes.
The beams settle in.
Cisterns are crooning
in a sea of breath,
the drone of whose body
counts the night hours
alone.

2. Asthai

Each tendril of her voice
buds and lays bare
impossible fantasy.
Deeper within,
the tabla’s pulse
sinks down, to rouse up
waters, whispering
from the wall-less cellars.


3.Sanchari

Quickened
to the stairs,
the torrent’s
spate threshes
against her voice,
exalts its fruits
to drive
blind sharks
that smell
for timid fish
from human lungs.

4. Abhoga

She stops;
to leave no
silt on
silenced sound.


4.Stretto.

(Noriko Ohara‘Girl’ in Second Dance to Japanese Music. Scottish Ballet June 15th 1980)

In the direction of lights,
her limbs rattle the space
with a tremor,
that is the moth’s.

Against a black page, her feet
cut off the dark to print
a silverpoint line that
is not the fault

of contact, but of the thought-touch,
which by implication,
hovers by the barres
that are the heart’s.

Her muscles speak beyond the feat
as the sea’s surge seeks to annul
the shore that gives it birth.;
that is her ambition,

erect in a cross-shape,
and so against the thrall
of timorous mind,
that is the prayer of her hand.

the smoothness lending its surface
to journey, not a path. Her limbs chant
of a loving
that has forgotten

her torpid thigh, the aching tendon,
that is the fetch,
the antagonist
of an effort.

Whose sculpted waste
cannot tell the body’s limit
that is the phrase
on the skin of her speech.

from whose interface she emerges slack
showing the wound of action,
in the care
to be craved.

5. Coda.

(Sergiu Chelebidache LSO, April 18th 1980, Debussy ;Iberia

.)

You have raised sleeping giants
to build the heights straight,
where the light has been confused
between the clouds and the snows.

Kingdom of summer borders,
you are taught to sing.
All the unsought troubadours
will smile from the map.

You will open your palms now
to douse the voices.
The drowsy builders will be
shown the way down.

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Publication Date: 07-31-2010

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