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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama
.

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Back to the Ground: Tanglewood Music Festival, Lenox, Massachusetts.

BY STUART GREENHOUSE

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 Their tangled angles do not end with me: for swallows
 to twist so fast! ... yet it was blue
 almost to my nose, where my breath leapt
 from the invisible to that visible they swept
 under; a fur of white stalking east; and soon, a glow
 where the majesticalest hand merely faltered. Proof follows, 

 or sound means nothing. It's our eyes our mind follows
 unrelenting, unimpeachable. Sound of: he swept
 the asphalt of bones; he swept the porch of blue; 
 he with his left toe unstuck forgotten swallows
 which we then felt free to finish; he, shambling, leapt
 out of earshot, a comet; in that air our coal throats glowed.

 This appetite for memory may be, like love's first glow, 
 general, granted; and in that nebulous swallow
 of what-comes-next we find our votive sky swept
 of human sound but not of human motion: it follows
 that within each eye is an articulate blue
 from which, as is happening now, a red thought leapt

 to set complexity: synthesis of that white-lipped
 horizon and the one I now, yes, see. And what do I, here, hear? Fellows
 jostling nearer to the speaker, wine-splits swallowed, 
 out of a practiced-on cello an intricate glow
 like a late day at the beach with closed eyes swept
 by—what?—tears? Sea-spray? A mute blue

 descending on the backs of gulls, as this blue
 descends (as repetition builds to a glow, 
 gaussian, resolving more than is) to follow
 the nearness of my eyes' one curve, to leap, 
 an entirety, from the butane backs of two swallows
 as they in-curve and outdo us, soundless and swept

 of the shagbark squalor of thought? What adze swept
 clean our scholar's thought of intent, of sound leapt
 in risen (motion!) motion to perfection, to a glow
 in the ear, to the intricatest possession of blue, 
 wholly wrung, from which this divine blue must have followed? 
 What sound's sound first blue-backed these bare barn swallows? 

 Whatever that ever was, my mind swallowed its blue
 as that blue thought leapt, convinced, into the sound I sight: upswept 
 by its own glow, the mind, such as it is, can only follow. 

 

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Memories of Amanda Davis




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