quieter

I picked up a cd of choral music at tower on friday night. Modern choral music all tends to sound the same at first: you're in some lofty cathedral and there's some airy harmonies and the sopranos going up and holding a high not while the tenors move the chord from a minor fifth into the major key. It's all mathematics at first, or at least it is for me. The soul of the music is only revealed after some repeated listenings.

I think I grabbed this cd on impulse: Tower is going out of business, so it was 60 percent off, anyway. But it also is a cd of poetry set to music, and the first song was a poem that I love: e e cummings' I thank you God for most this amazing day.

I was trying to explain to my gf about cummings' sonnets– how modern they were, and yet how closely he stayed in form to the Shakespearean sonnet, and how much of his poetry spoke of his love of woman's bodies, and their souls.

It was from cumming that I first learned that love was possible separate from all that society hitches on to love: marriage, family, fidelity. That one can love a prostitute, that one can love the curve of a woman's collarbone, and that love can be pure, breaking the bounds of taboo.

and from cummings I also learned to celebrate life, every day, with a spirit of gratitude.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love of wings:and a gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake
and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)