Day 29 the singer the song

 Portrait of a child as Frank Sinatra


It was not the music itself

But the way the record settles on the player

And the unexpected weight of it

The 78


And it was as if evenings

We’re bottled and poured as measures

One for my baby



Me and lotte lenya


Tilly Loch,

Lotte Lenya's lover and surrealist dancer

Getting out of the bath

And waking up the staircase of the central hall

Of her husband’s mansion

Left wet footprints on the carpet

Which he later would have woven

Into the design

And followed when he was lonely


Oh Lotte of the 4 husbands

I would sing odd and lonely in the evenings

The songs of Brecht and Weill

Listening to the original recordings

That sublime rasp of a voice

Everything the absolute opposite.

To my sheltered self

Who would never dare but had such

Fascistic control over myself.


Lotte Lenya smoked and married 

and was alone and loved and sang

And the ship 

The black freighter 

Hauled its weight , sloughed anchor,

And settled in port 

As the pirates stole off board

Knives between their teeth, 

As I waited,cleaned 

In uniform of my own design


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 28 venn

  The venn The venn diagram of us interacts  Not so much intersects  as breaks their bubbles and swallows up When we're cold, the barriers immutable  Are solid You know the magic trick where the rings interlap That’s us that’s us  That’s us Unless it can be proved that  We are not And the rings fall apart The venn diagram of us interacts  Two become trefoil Or some rough alchemy You know the new leaf That is three in one. From two That’s us that’s us You know the lonely petals. That’s us too We have likes in common But we also have hatred This is where your worst behaviour. Seeps into and joins into the best of mine. Reverse it . Make it thoughts. Make it colours For too long we've been subset Facing subset. Allowing statistics to map  And to define geometry, Laying out The diagram of us 
Read more

Day 2 Sappho remixed

Again love, the limb-loosener, rattles me bittersweet, irresistible, a crawling beast. Look I told you  When I was being clever That Nosferatu is a modern love story   As Sappho writes, is hunger And as she also wrote Love is a battlefield  All the untidy soldiers  No match for what we care for That mild word What makes us live and love on and on  And my widowed grandmother Not speaking at the man she’d lost decades before But singing in a quiver voice at no one Honestly, I wish I were dead. “Alas, how terribly we suffer, Sappho. I really leave you against my will.” The lynchian red neon Of heartbreak hotel By the white rock of Delphi I knew I’d lost Everything I care for  But choose to think of it like this A temporary madness Leaping into the dark waters 
Read more

Day 24 the music

The last time we made music, All of us, All the order were masked  In white and blue And for these in it for the haul, black crepe It was a kind of slow horror and we saw A body shipped out in a narrow boat A stretcher or a door You sister opened the creaked old iPad Screen also dead, but underneath the apps trying Garageband, and laid a beat down as if she Were planning something good And you spoke over it With what new words came into your head And they were great The cut glass of your voice And I was thinking  Could every memory be in a song? Like this? Every memory like this Able to wth a finger halt the sky From moving and the sun from make arc And the moon from dilating shrinking It’s a mood And the song was called As I recall it, silver trees in a birch wood Of my reflection. Dark brown dye And a kind of powdery cold Some got tall, some didn’t-see How I have got older but I do remember all of it, that song The name of it was called   I'm lost here somewhere  F...
Read more