Fourteen Lyrics

A Duet Between the Composer and His Wife-Piano

For Alain and JoJo Lefevre, Athens, Christmas 1999

1

You are the resting-place for my tired fingers,
Between the sheets, where sultry music lingers
I find your coolness warm, your softness silk
To soothe my weary limbs. Skin white as milk

Conceals the secret ebony of your dark
And beating Africa of scented shade,
The jungle rituals, wild rites of spring,
The orgies of the night, the sacred glade

Where virgins are instructed in the arts
Of pleasing Priapus, to bud and flower
As Cupid's priestesses, who throw his darts
At every stranger wandering near their bower;

And so am I entrapped, enchanted, held
Amongst those limbs that wind like some green vine
About my own, with melodies infused
To hold you spellbound in this chant of mine.

2

In our communion I am the cup
Large as an ocean, to hold your strong tides,
For you are a giant of waters to sip
For whom clamours loudly the whole world besides.

And there is no landmass or sea on the globe
Which we have not crossed in the currents of time
To pour in the ears of the crowd what we are,
The waterfall sounds of our rhythm and rhyme;

Yet I am too small as a vessel for you,
The spring of your brilliance my lip overflows,
You take on strange shapes which are lightsome and new,
And where this will end no-one now living knows;

For poets and prophets have swum in our stream
And now are enlightened with lightning and fire,
Bright fish have been hatched in our pool of desire,
And the gods are awakening out of our dream.

3

The darkness of pleasure glows now with hot embers
And sulphurous sparks where the night has been split
By sudden eruptions of fire. Flesh remembers
Itself as a flame in the flaring white pit

Of the volcano's joy, where the earth and heaven join
To make a new world, and renew what is old,
Revealing the mineral wealth in the loin
Of the ground, made most gorgeous with jewels and gold,

Encrusting fresh islands with colourful gems,
Fair gardens of light on the edge of the sea,
Sonatas and symphonies, jigs, requiems
The gift of your love to the shadows in me.

4

And you are my passion, this in the daemon garden
Where the statues walk at night, and converse
In the topiary mazes whose twists harden
Into the Greek meander of a tune and verse;

The satyrs and the dryads to the marble flute
Dance, and Pan with his animals and birds
Spells out the eternal season, its power to transmute
All that is mortal to life without end, without words

Rebirth and renewal, the gentle and violent savage
Godling whose price is the death of our cavilling reason;
We are much more than machines, and the stone dancers ravage
This year's automata, to whom your live music is poison.

5

But we have had affairs, machine and I,
Long trysts in darkened boxes full of wires,
The thing now wants to fake a man's desires,
And many of us are lost utterly,

In love with something dead, which never lives,
Which cannot hear with ears that have a mind,
Which goes, though full of images, so blind
It cannot see the worshipper who gives

His every penny to be given a part
In the electric dream; paralysis
Of vision and of hearing, he calls art
And longs to give its chimaeras a kiss.

6

My darling, I forgive you, for I feel
There is no harm in loving the unreal,
So long as such a love does not pervert
The course of marriage; nobody was hurt
And many were amazed at what you did;
You were no prisoner, could lift the lid
And step out of the frame; we are not rich
And you had contracts with the metal bitch-
She paid, you left, I suffered for a while,
Deprived of your composure, and your smile,
But now you have returned, once more in tune
Enough to charm the cat, sing down the moon,
Enchant the frost, bring on midwinter spring,
And scan a sonnet out of anything.

7

I have consulted many animals
In order to pace out the living beat
Which goes about the world with heads and tails
Singing and barking, on its many feet
And now am like the proverb's centipede
Who, when consulted on how he should walk
Fell in a ditch, all tangled, and was freed
Only when told to stop his counting talk;
It does not do to think too much of how
The fingers wiggle when the mind ascends
The steps of heaven thereby, the world below
Is better out of sight, composing mends
Its emptiness on form, form emptiness
Distributes to be free for loveliness.

8

Substance dissolves, but music stays when there
Is nothing left of us but light and air,
When memory is dust, some foreign hand
Will give us once more voices, and remind
Some alien audience without legs and arms
Floating in space, of our most ancient charms,
What human beings were, before the fall
From knowledge killed the crying animal,
Left nothing but fierce tribes and lost machines,
A broken planet playing its last scenes,
And so it's most important to compose
Songs that are comprehensible to those
Who are not with us now, may never see
This world as we do; open tunes, and free.

9

You are my mirror, I who am the dance
And you the dancer, turned by exercise
Into the melody's reflection, prance
And pirouette, fierce Shiva in disguise,
The pulsing god of fire whose every step
Makes time turn in the universe, and breathe
Upon the surface of our sight the stop
And start of form and void, to do to death
And bring to birth, to sigh and to inspire
Epiphanies and wars, to turn again
And forge within the heart of our desire
New speculation, and the mild refrain
Which settles quarrels, makes a sudden peace
For those who listen find in us release.

10

The silence and the sound, the silent sound,
The sounding silence; Prometheus unbound
Who brings fire to the man-ape, and control
Of circumstance and time, and shaping tools,
The drum and cymbal, symbol, rapping soul
And body, pen and paper, singing-schools,
The soaring voices lifting beyond sense
Our feelings for the worlds beyond this world,
The metaphysics' leaping reference
Which leads to Einstein's formula, the whole
Of spacetime in one cypher simply curled,
A spring of infinite clockwork, recompense
For generations' labour, and a grace
For symphones of light's resounding pace.

11

And you in repetition, practice, bent
By your piano into quaver shapes,
An animal made doubly innocent
By strict harmonics, angel who escapes

Through constant work from bestial Babylon,
This market-place where every soul's for sale,
Where Faustus rules, the devil's nearly won,
The average Joe is bought for cakes and ale,

But you are not negotiable. You must play,
And music is not made by managers
Of banks, the mortgage-brokers will not pay
Out loans to buy a score, the Muse defers

Only to the one-pointed mind, and gives
Mastery to the man who truly lives.

12

And so to the fandango: rattle, roll
The gypsy celebrant in scarlet skirts
Who leaps up on the table and lets rip

With kicks and spins, staccato hop and skip
And tango stride, the flounces as she flirts
Most flagrantly with every youthful male

Who's come to the bordello for a song,
Perhaps a pecadillo, sure to drink
Too much red vino, indulge in loose talk,

(Not very wise, we're under Franco), stalk
The barmaids, tell the jefe what they think
Of his stale humour, staying far too long,

And spending all their wages on the girls,
Whilst still the clinking, spitting gypsy whirls.

13

And the sun sinks
And the sea drinks up pinks

Neptune is thirsty tonight
To get drunk on light

And the mountains have bedded a star
And I have smoothed the bedspread, dear,

And the sky is a silken cloth
And the sea is being drawn up

Into the night, which is getting dressed
In sequins and pearls, and the nightingale

Is practising her scales for the first night,
Her song of yearning for memories lost,

But I remember.
I cannot forget.

14

Let us be quiet again,
And wait for the first note
Of liquid silver to fall
From the bird's throat

Who sings to the moon she cannot see
So that he will rise and be round
Or crescent-shaped to hold her song;

In the shrubbery
The satyrs are forming out of silence
And in the amphitheatre
The ghosts are awaiting
An absent orchestra.

Copyright © Charlotte Appleton 2003