I.
You will also, on occasion– leave off where you first began. Like a watch’s weaker hand, we illustrate uncertainty…
II.
Whether storming, or escaping, any home we know not how to address: a vacant museum, the cusp of an hourglass
III.
An unspoken natural law: Only in censored footage do we note silence, do we note polarity. (The color of musing.
IV.
The chroma of hurry.) On the fifth and seventh floor: the tenants: pouring into boxes possessions they don’t want
V.
To be remembered for. If one is as protective of his compass as the other is, his knife: we say the two harmonize.
VI.
At any given crisis: any given prophet may unknowingly discard the ability to reconsider… “Often, before the first
VII.
Raindrops explode into hypnotic clockwork; after love has been made, and made, and couldn’t hold itself together–”
I.
The narrator whispered, I forget which key you said never to use. An estimated eighty letters were lost in the move…
4 Comments
I’m diggin this format. Each line holds their own temporality in the matter of the whole; all folding into itself.
Although, I’m questioning the “Tonic” and how that relates to the clockwork theme running throughout. Also, I find myself unable to anchor onto any central character as there seems to be a story being told. How do eighty lost letters, tonic, moving, and circular time interconnect?
Just some questions/comments, off the cuff. To note, I liked the idea of a narrator being introduced at the end (beginning).
Do you mind if I link your site to my blog (http://lingerlit.blogspot.com)?
Peace,
Chris
Hey Chris,
Thanks for the comment.
A bit of context:
The tonic is the first note of a musical scale, and in the tonal method of music composition, the tonic is the pitch upon which all other pitches of a piece are hierarchically centered.
A secret. Can you keep it? ;) This particular piece is part of a larger body–a book, if you will. Structurally speaking, the work as a whole will be based upon principles in music theory–or time; and thematically speaking, on migration, exile, & geography–or space. It will consist of an estimated eighty poems, the first of which (and this is key) is Tonic.
With regard to your final query: by all means. Link away.
A
Well, I feel silly. The Roman numerals should have been a dead give-away beyond the title. Oye!
I’m interested to hear how you are planning this out. The Tonic is in a playful prose. So, how does language play a role in keeping or straying from tempo?
Are you following a more classical sense of movements? Or is it more of a Berlioz-esque, it goes where it goes kinda of thing?
Sorry for the list of questions, just sounds like an amazing project.
–Chris
Ah–but don’t fret, for the clockwork/recurrence theme you detected is implicit in the scale/chord metaphor. You weren’t so far off, in fact, you were rather dead-on.
Of “classical movements” vs. Berlioz-esque spontanaity, well, the poet to some extent must “go where the poem goes” and then attempt to harness and craft whatever pattern emerges. Regarding Berlioz in particular, more than his composership I’m interested in his personal response to romanticism–and how he later fled the music scene to (ironically) write about the art. (See: Treatise on Instrumentation.)
Which leads me to question of the pieces as “movements.” Let X, for a moment, be Berlioz–the person. Let music, and its specialized constructs of time: be the poetic line, the landscape, the highway, he treads across.
We know music has the greatest capacity of all art forms to immediately access and express raw emotion–beyond those that are to some degree “rooted in space”–a notion which I don’t seek to disprove, but rather newly portray. Let time stand for space. Thus opens the discussion of our given dimensions: their limits, and possibilities.
For the perespective the book seeks to capture: with music serving as the physical “framework” of the page, and then used as a point of reference throughout–we’ll call “the limits of language” the temporal “music of our world.”
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