Touching an oak leaf in my old age I bring to bear on it the pain of Chinese philosophy. I am letting the oak leaf fall down into my old age like a leaf that will fall down into a meadow well or brooklet to be still on the face of the water and to fulfill the touching of the oak leaf to the old man in me, the old man that was once in my heart, no man more severe. The oak leaf will fall still more silently. It is an old man’s oak leaf that will still fall.
Your music, Doctor Rose, springs like chokecherries to the lips of the soprano all April. April may, or it may not. Last April, it was music, stars rushing their beautiful manners and bleak mannerisms, the sea-battles of September, your cold red High Church. Ancient explosions are destroying my sleep. There are too many angry tulips streaked with blood, too many stars with blood in their hair. Show me the blasted steel column where they hung Doctor Rose, his heart hammered with a burning television and a red clock, black star leaf in a planet, sword-sorcery, crushed midnight diamonds.
A castle shuddering with C-sharp major: a lake’s silent, unexplored colors. This little world of a cloister with its churchyards under a diamond-spinning heaven near a forest and a town is identified by a moon-wheel, ready for Christmas snow. Here we can half-rest until one hundred rainstorms of brilliant gold spill onto smoked glass and towns fall into the sun. Such features, part of an ordinary flower, figure in ordinary sonatas, the ones in which Schubert proves his Egyptian roots. Hard to believe her clarinet: It’s getting harder to believe that dream-work should unfold dead thunder.
