Cold Spring Sonnet

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The next day
was much warmer.
– Elizabeth Bishop

A golden finch is singing rain in notes
That fall in desperate distances of cloud –
The agony of rust that sounds a gate’s
Intransigent articulation. Wood
And field are cropping frozen fog and hold
Their tongues to seek relief from winter’s chafe.
This March is hard and time is growing old
While April strives to dream the fallen leaf.

The snow dispersed beneath a chilling rain
Is pocking furrows, mocking shadows’ claims
To death and night and all that draws a line
In time – what ties to stone our names
And dates – what pulls at earth with rusty cry
And rips the frozen hinges off the sky.

You! Tubular

New From Korrektiv Records

image

“Play Me” – the first single from the musical collective Good Country People.

Vocals: Mary Ann Carr

Backup vocals: Betty Duffy

Music: Bill Wilson

Words: Matthew Lickona

Good Country People - Play Me

Amazon
Spread the word. You know – if you like it.

Darkness

 

From the Dominican Office of Tenebrae (‘Darkness’) for Good Friday, A.D. 2009, at Blackfriars, Oxford.

The text for this portion of the service is the Benedictus, or Canticle of Zechariah. Though this canticle, comprising Luke 1:68-79, is part of the Church’s morning prayer every day of the year (at the hour of Lauds), it has a special resonance on these days.

Because of the compassionate kindness of our God,
the dawn from on high shall break upon u
s

To shine on those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,
to guide our feet in the way of peace.

Poetry and the Bishop

Speaking of Korrektiv/Gerasene amigo Bishop Daniel Flores, see what he hath wrought from the heights of Parnassus down in the depths of Texas:

http://bishopflores.blogspot.com/2013/03/la-pasion-en-la-traduccion-passion-in.html#comment-form

JOB

Bob Dylan, Jakob Dylan, and the Catholic Church

bob dylan and pope john paul

From an interview with Bob Dylan that appeared in Der Spiegel on October 16, 1997:

Q: How was it for you to be playing for the Pope in Bologna a few weeks ago?

A: A great show.

Q: Why?

A: It just was.

In another interview (recently cited by Ken Layne, writing irreverently in The Awl), Bob said of the show, “He’s the Pope. You know what I mean? There’s only one Pope, right?”

Admittedly, these are just a couple of odd, tiny pieces in the giant jigsaw puzzle that is Bob Dylan, but they perhaps point to certain sympathies, certain leanings with regards to Catholicism.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Now we have Bob’s son Jakob coming out with a new Wallflowers album that has a lead-off song entitled “Hospital for Sinners” that also bespeaks a leaning in the direction of a distinctly Catholic sensibility. Listen to it here and see what you think.

Finally, let’s hear from Fr. Barron on Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, and Thomas Merton.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, other than: Bob, Jakob, Thomas, Keith … I’ll see you at Mass sometime.

A Little Vaguely Valentinish Irony…

irony in headlines

…from across the pond.

And a bonus poem – in the spirit of Potter’s blotter:

The Anti-Valentine

Outside your zone
Away from my orbit
Out of your shadow
A moment alone –
No, rather – apart.
It’s what we know:

Alone.
Apart. A–
Lone. A–
Part.
A lone.
A part.

Our life has been
A mutual eclipse
Of heart from heart,
And the difference it
Makes between
These two distinct and lonely partings of lips.

Three Pieces for Barbara

OBrien Pictures 024

I
It’s pieces of sky reflecting the ground
She whispers from deep within her loamy
Brown eyes, the watchful ones she inherited
From her earnest aunt and her laughing mother.
A flood of flakes fall across the window
And pass their questions on to a landscape as stormy
As her eyes. She proofs the other weather
In sentences of twinned, lonely footprints
That trail off beneath the sad light of day’s lid
Closing eyes that fill up with falling snow…
Unlike poems, a child’s daydreams are foolproof.

II
My daughter knows poetry, although
She thinks outside rhyme and meter’s weather.
The craft escapes her, but genius will grow
With increasing accumulations.
The day snows and snows and snows, and she over-
Excites herself. The promise of being
Buried up to the roof in it settles her
To comedy in cataclysmic images
And seismic euphoria and metaphoric
Meteorology: Snow is so freeing.
It’s cold and white and crests her roof before noon.

III
The snow is like earth’s shadow in the sky.
She’s expert at the poetic make-up of a sigh
Too young for real grief. My daughter, full
Of syllogisms of the heart, knows the kind
That matter to this falling play of time
Dancing its old jig in her youthful blood. It thrills
Her soul back to earth to find the ground.
For if (as she sweeps her glances through a room)
All love is deep and all deep things return
Then it is for and to love that love is born –
Even as all things turn from time to time to grief.

It was inevitable

big black

…that I would someday get around to posting this man’s work – which I celebrate with abandon.

You have to dig it.

Wendell B

That’s when Wendell B takes a shot
At all the folks that hold that marriage means
Just one man and one woman
They were reared to pledge their faith
Somewhere down the line they chose
To stand howe’er the wind blows
Stand howe’er the wind blows from he

Thanks for the heads-up, Mrs. D.

This is a demo store for testing purposes — no orders shall be fulfilled.