LAMENTO : QUASI
Remember, surfer, thou are dust; it is the blight. Wherefore thence this matutinal montage about funeral-urns ? Is it the sport aspect ? That all? Sure now ? It must have been nineteen fifty four, the morning already very hot, harnessed horses frisky, suppressed excitement. The still still hay-knife in its oiled mowing-machine sheath was ready for bloody murder, two erring corncrakes, the cleanly sawn-off rabbit leg. Far in the future lay her scream, dormant in June, you saw that. Far in your future was this thrust to write this now, eyes filmed over. June fused the bread-knife, blood culture at its cunning work and silence after the Big Scream down in the back-field and our locked away meat-carver and that wonky funeral with its hilarious urn. A child´s bliss was our hay smell. Maybe the muzzle. Wash your strait-jacket and hang it out ; marvellous drying today. Oil carefully before horses´nostrils begin to drip green streams. Child-harbinger of just what are you getting at here, eh ? You´ll get a good slap !
A PAGE FALLS OPEN : the reader´s name is there. It always has been and always will be. Subsequent letters see the script panic across this screen in hellish self-doubt. One day raptures; the next fights back. My lover bit my lip, storming off to wake abruptly from a dream of our blue tent filtering the Toledo light in . O Toledo, we´re parched! My lover has stolen all that we knew and all that I owned. The tone is the thing, surely ? Coax , not hector.
YES , THIS GARDEN WAS GOOD FOR THE PEN :
I did write the “FOUR ORCHESTRAL LIEDER” here. And my
” 9 PRATOLEVA PEARLS ” for Solo Piano. And the 2009
“CLARINET QUINTET ” . And ” SONGS OF TERROR AND LOVE”. And “QUASI UNA SARABANDA” which the Swiss Ensemble , Antipodes, premiered this summer in Berne, Basle and Zürich. Swiss Radio broadcast on July 17.