Klassinen musiikki - John Mitchell
    Säveltäjä John Mitchell - Klassinen musiikki

Fourteen Poems by Anne Sexton

Set by John Mitchell (1941-), op. 114 (2002)
Texts by Anne Sexton (1928-1974)


1. The starry night


The town does not exist
 except where one black-haired tree slips
 up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
 The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
 Oh starry starry night! This is how
 I want to die.

 It moves. They are all alive.
 Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
 to push children, like a god, from its eye.
 The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
 Oh starry starry night! This is how
 I want to die:

 into that rushing beast of the night,
 sucked up by that great dragon, to split
 from my life with no flag,
 no belly,
 no cry.

2. The balance wheel


Where I waved at the sky
 And waited your love through a February sleep,
 I saw birds swinging in, watched them multiply
 Into a tree, weaving on a branch, cradling a keep
 In the arms of April sprung from the south to occupy
 This slow lap of land, like cogs of some balance wheel.
 I saw them build the air, with that motion birds feel.

 Where I wave at the sky
 And understand love, knowing our August heat,
 I see birds pulling past the dim frosted thigh
 Of Autumn, unlatched from the nest, and wing-beat
 For the south, making their high dots across the sky,
 Like beauty spots marking a still perfect cheek.
 I see them bend the air, slipping away, for what birds seek.

3. I Remember


By the first of August
 the invisible beetles began
 to snore and the grass was
 as tough as hemp and was
 no color - no more than
 the sand was a color and
 we had worn our bare feet
 bare since the twentieth
 of June and there were times
 we forgot to wind up your
 alarm clock and some nights
 we took our gin warm and neat
 from old jelly glasses while
 the sun blew out of sight
 like a red picture hat and
 one day I tied my hair back
 with a ribbon and you said
 that I looked almost like
 a puritan lady and what
 I remember best is that
 the door to your room was
 the door to mine.

4. Her kind


I have gone out, a possessed witch,
 haunting the black air, braver at night;
 dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
 over the plain houses, light by light:
 lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
 A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
 I have been her kind.

 I have found the warm caves in the woods,
 filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
 closets, silks, innumerable goods;
 fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
 whining, rearranging the disaligned.
 A woman like that is misunderstood.
 I have been her kind.

 I have ridden in your cart, driver,
 waved my nude arms at villages going by,
 learning the last bright routes, survivor
 where your flames still bite my thigh
 and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
 A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
 I have been her kind.

5. With mercy for the Greedy


Concerning your letter in which you ask
 me to call a priest and in which you ask
 me to wear The Cross that you enclose;
 your own cross,
 your dog-bitten cross,
 no larger than a thumb,
 small and wooden, no thorns, this rose -

 I pray to its shadow,
 that gray place
 where it lies on your letter...deep, deep.
 I detest my sins and I try to believe
 in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face,
 its solid neck, its brown sleep.

 True. There is
 a beautiful Jesus.
 He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
 How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
 How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!
 But I can't. Need is not quite belief.

 All morning long
 I have worn
 your cross, hung with package string around my throat.
 It tapped me lightly as a child's heart might,
 tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born.
 Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.

6. Music swims back to me


Wait Mister. Which way is home?
 They turned the light out
 and the dark is moving in the corner.
 There are no sign posts in this room,
 four ladies, over eighty,
 in diapers every one of them.
 La la la, Oh music swims back to me
 and I can feel the tune they played
 the night they left me
 in this private institution on a hill.

 Imagine it. A radio playing
 and everyone here was crazy.
 I liked it and danced in a circle.
 Music pours over the sense
 and in a funny way
 music sees more than I.
 I mean it remembers better;
 remembers the first night here.
 It was the strangled cold of November;
 even the stars were strapped in the sky
 and that moon too bright
 forking through the bars to stick me
 with a singing in the head.
 I have forgotten all the rest.

 They lock me in this chair at eight a.m.
 and there are no signs to tell the way,
 just the radio beating to itself
 and the song that remembers
 more than I. Oh, la la la,
 this music swims back to me.
 The night I came I danced a circle
 and was not afraid
 Mister?

7. O Mary, fragile mother


O Mary, fragile mother,
 hear me, hear me now
 although I do not know your words.
 The black rosary with its silver Christ
 lies unblessed in my hand
 for I am the unbeliever.
 Each bead is round and hard between my fingers,
 a small black angel.
 O Mary, fragile mother,
 hear me, hear me now

O Mary, permit me this grace,
 this crossing over,
 although I am ugly,
 submerged in my own past
 and my own madness.
 Although there are chairs
 I lie on the floor.
 Only my hands are alive,
 touching beads.
 O Mary, fragile mother,
 hear me, hear me now

Word for word I stumble.
 A beginner, I feel your mouth touch mine.
 I count beads as waves,
 hammering in upon me.
 I am ill at their numbers,
 sick  in the summer heat
 and the window above me
 is my only listener, 
 a large taker, a soother,
 giver of breath,
 exhaling her wide lung like an enormous fish.

Closer and closer
 comes the hour of my death
 In the mind there is a thin alley called death
 and I move through it as
 through water.
 My body is useless.
 It lies, curled like a dog on the carpet.
 It has given up.

 Mary, fragile mother,
 hear me, hear me now.

8. Frenzy


I am not lazy.
 I am on the amphetamine of the soul.
 I am, each day,
 typing out the God
 my typewriter believes in.
 Very quick. Very intense,
 like a wolf at a live heart.
 Not lazy.
 When a lazy man, they say,
 looks toward heaven,
 the angels close the windows.

 Oh angels,
 keep the windows open
 so that I may reach in
 and steal each object,
 objects that tell me the sea is not dying,
 objects that tell me the dirt has a life-wish,
 that the Christ who walked for me,
 walked on true ground
 and that this frenzy,
 like bees stinging the heart all morning,
 will keep the angels
 with their windows open,
 wide as an English bathtub.

9. Housewife


Some women marry houses.
 It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,
 a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
 The walls are permanent and pink.
 See how she sits on her knees all day,
 faithfully washing herself down.
 Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
 into their fleshy mothers.
 A woman is her mother.
 That's the main thing.

10. Small wire


My faith
 is a great weight
 hung on a small wire,
 as doth the spider
 hang her baby on a thin web,
 as doth the vine,
 twiggy and wooden,
 hold up grapes
 like eyeballs,
 as many angels
 dance on the head of a pin.

 God does not need
 too much wire to keep Him there,
 just a thin vein,
 with blood pushing back and forth in it,
 and some love.
 As it has been said:
 Love and a cough
 cannot be concealed.
 Even a small cough.
 Even a small love.
 So if you have only a thin wire,
 God does not mind.
 He will enter your hands
 as easily as ten cents used to
 bring forth a Coke.

11. Mr. Mine


Notice how he has numbered the blue veins
 in my breast. Moreover there are ten freckles.
 Now he goes left. Now he goes right.
 He is building a city, a city of flesh.
 He's an industrialist. He has starved in cellars
 and, ladies and gentlemen, he's been broken by iron,
 by the blood, by the metal, by the triumphant
 iron of his mother's death. But he begins again.
 Now he constructs me. He is consumed by the city.
 From the glory of boards he has built me up.
 From the wonder of concrete he has molded me.
 He is building a city, a city of flesh.
 He's an industrialist.
He has given me six hundred street signs.
 The time I was dancing he built a museum.
 He built ten blocks when I moved on the bed.
 He constructed an overpass when I left.
 I gave him flowers and he built an airport.
 For traffic lights he handed out red and green
 lollipops. Yet in my heart I am go children slow.

12. Where it was at back then


Husband,
 last night I dreamt
 they cut off your hands and feet.
 Husband,
 you whispered to me,
 Now we are both incomplete.

 Husband,
 I held all four
 in my arms like sons and daughters.
 Husband,
 I bent slowly down
 and washed them in magical waters.

 Husband,
 I placed each one
 where it belonged on you.
 "A miracle,"
 you said and we laughed
 the laugh of the well-to-do.

13. Just once


Just once I knew what life was for.
 In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
 walked there along the Charles River,
 watched the lights copying themselves,
 all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening
 their mouths as wide as opera singers;
 counted the stars, my little campaigners,
 my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love
 on the night green side of it and cried
 my heart to the eastbound cars and cried
 my heart to the westbound cars and took
 my truth across a small humped bridge
 and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home
 and hoarded these constants into morning
 only to find them gone.

14. In Excelsis


It is half winter, half spring,
 and Barbara and I are standing
 confronting the ocean.
 Its mouth is open very wide,
 and it has dug up its green,
 throwing it, throwing it at the shore.
 You say it is angry.
 I say it is like a kicked Madonna.
 Its womb collapses, drunk with its fever.
 We breathe in its fury.

 I, the inlander,
 am here with you for just a small space.
 I am almost afraid,
 so long gone from the sea.
 I have seen her smooth as a cheek.
 I have seen her easy,
 doing her business,
 lapping in.
 I have seen her rolling her hoops of blue.
 I have seen her tear the land off.
 I have seen her drown me twice,
 and yet not take me.
 You tell me that as the green drains backward
 it covers Britain,
 but have you never stood on that shore
 and seen it cover you?

 We have come to worship,
 the tongues of the surf are prayers,
 and we vow,
 the unspeakable vow.
 Both silently.
 Both differently.
 I wish to enter her like a dream,
 leaving my roots here on the beach
 like a pan of knives.
 And my past to unravel, with its knots and snarls,
 and walk into ocean,
 letting it explode over me
 and outward, where I would drink the moon
 and my clothes would slip away,
 and I would sink into the great mother arms
 I never had,
 except here where the abyss
 throws itself on the sand
 blow by blow,
 over and over,
 and we stand on the shore
 loving its pulse
 as it swallows the stars,
 and has since it all began
 and will continue into oblivion,
 past our knowing
 and the wild toppling green that enters us today,
 for a small time
 in half winter, half spring.

Google

BIOGRAFIA

John Mitchellin biografia

TUOTANTO

Tuotanto kokonaisuudessaan

ÄÄNITALLENTEET

Äänikatkelmia RealPlayer- ja mp3-muodossa

Kokonaisia kappaleita mp3-muodossa •

VIDEO

Elokuva: The Beauty of Touch. rm- mpeg1- mpeg2- ja avi-muodossa. Download DivX Player ja RealPlayer 10

Elokuva •

RUNO

LINKIT

Internet-hakemistoja ja klassisen musiikin lähteitä, tietoja yksittäisistä runoilijoista sekä yleisiä maailmanlaajuisia tietolähteitä

KUVIA

Runoilijoiden ja maalareiden muotokuvia, klassisia mestariteoksia

Wallpaper gratis •

KAUPPA

CD-levyjen tilaus •
Fraktaali •
Stamps •

NUOTIT

Partitions •
Partituras •
Spartiti •

Sivustokartta   Yhteystiedot
©2000-2020 John Mitchell. Kaikki oikeudet pidätetään.