[Reads the following]:
From Federico García Lorca: Suites (published by Green Integer, 2001)
Night: A Suite for Piano & Poet's Voice
Sketches
That road got no people. That road.
That weevil got no home. That weevil.
And this sheepbell gone to sleep. This sheepbell.
Prelude
The bullock slowly shuts his eyes.
Heat in the stable. Prelude to the night.
In a Corner of the Sky
The old star shuts her bleary eyes.
The new star wants to paint the night blue.
(In the firtrees on the mountain: fireflies.)
The Whole Works
The wind’s hand caresses the forehead of space again & again. The stars half-close their blue eyelids again & again.A Star
There is a tranquil star, a star that has no eyelids. —Where? —A star ... In sleepy water. In the pond.
Swath
O St. James Road. O Milky Way. (O night of love for me when yellow bird was painted painted painted up in the lemon tree.)
One
That romantic star (one for magnolia, one for the roses).
That romantic star just went crazy.
Tralalee, tralala.
(Sing, little frog, in your shadowy hut.)
Ursa Major
Bear mother gives suck to the stars astride her belly:
Grunt grunt.
Run off, star babies: tender little stars.
Memory
Our Lady Moon still hidden, playing ring around a wheel. She makes herself look silly. Loony moon.
At the Poorhouse
And the poor stars that have no light
—o sorrow, sorrow, o lamentation!—
end up stuck in muddy blue.
O sorrow, sorrow, o lamentation!
Comet
Venus
Below
The Great Sadness
A Newton Suite
Newton’s Nose
Onto the nose of Newton a large apple falls. A meteor of truths. Last fruit to dangle from the tree of Science.
And big Newton scratches his Saxon nostrils. A white moon over these barbaric strings of lace: the beech trees.
In the Woods
The gnomes astride their secrets tear their beards out. They tie up Death & make the Echoes mislead men with mirrors. In a corner lies the secret: in the open, dead. His companions mourn him. A blue boy with iron feet— a glowing star between his eyebrows. His companions mourn him. And the green lake trembles. In the wind.
Harmony
Waves rhyme with sighs & stars with crickets. Atremble in the cornea the whole cold sky. A dot, a synthesis, infinity’s.
But who joins waves with sighs? And stars with crickets? Just hope these geniuses be missing something. The proofs keep drifting by among us.
The Philosopher’s Last Walk
Newton was taking a walk. Death had followed him, strumming his guitar. Newton was taking a walk. The worms gnawed through his apple.
The wind hummed in the trees, the river beneath the branches. (Wordsworth would have cried.) The philosopher was striking unimaginable poses, was waiting for another apple.
He ran along the road. He stretched out by the water. He saw how his face would sink in the moon’s reflection. Newton wept.
And high up on a cedar two old owls yammered. Slowly in the night the wise man went back home. He dreamt enormous pyramids of apples.
Replica
Adam ate an apple from the Virgin Eve. Newton was a second Adam— Science’s. The first knew Beauty. The second a Pegasus bowed down by chains. And neither one was guilty. Their two apples pink & fresh but with a bitter history. The severed breasts of innocence, poor child.
Question
Why was it the apple & not the orange or the polyhedral pomegranate? Why this virgin fruit to clue them in, this smooth & gentle pippin? What admirable symbol lies dormant at its core? Adam, Paris, Newton carry it inside their souls & fondle it without a clue to what it is.
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