So I went to this performance last night, titled "A Universe of Dreams". It was by the Ensemble Galilei, a group of a few musicians, in conjunction with an NPR announcer, who created in this show a merging of poetry, pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, and music. It was amazing, so I thought I'd copy one of the poems from it below. That's it for now!
The Science of the Night, by Stanley Kunitz
I touch you in the night, whose gift was you,
My careless sprawler,
And I touch you cold, unstirring, star-bemused,
That have become the land of your self-strangeness.
What long seduction of the bone has led you
Down the imploring roads I cannot take
Into the arms of ghosts I never knew,
Leaving my manhood on a rumpled field
To guard you where you lie so deep
In absent-mindedness,
Caught in the calcium snows of sleep?
And even should I track you to your birth
Through all the cities of your mortal trial,
As in my jealous thought I try to do,
You would escape me--from the brink of earth
Take off to where the lawless auroras run,
You with your wild and metaphysic heart.
My touch is on you, who are light-years gone.
We are not souls but systems, and we move
In clouds of our unknowing
like great nebulae.
Our very motives swirl and have their start
With father lion and with mother crab.
Dreamer, my own lost rib,
Whose planetary dust is blowing
Past archipelagoes of myth and light
What far Magellans are you mistress of
To whom you speed the pleasure of your art?
As through a glass that magnifies my loss
I see the lines of your spectrum shifting red,
The universe expanding, thinning out,
Our worlds flying, oh flying, fast apart.
From hooded powers and from abstract flight
I summon you, your person and your pride.
Fall to me now from outer space,
Still fastened desperately to my side;
Through gulfs of streaming air
Bring me the mornings of the milky ways
Down to my threshold in your drowsy eyes;
And by the virtue of your honeyed word
Restore the liquid language of the moon,
That in gold mines of secrecy you delve.
Awake!
My whirling hands stay at the noon,
Each cell within my body holds a heart
And all my hearts in unison strike twelve.
1 comment:
...wow...
Beautiful...I have no doubt the show was something truly special. I wish I was back in the states and taking leave. I'd consider it worth it just to have been there for that alone. It's ironic how looking up at the stars at night can make a person feel so small and alone in the Universe and yet also feel so connected at the same time. A vast, and humbling sense of hope and despair all at once...
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